Neural Structure Learning with Stochastic Differential Equations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wang, Benjie, Jennings, Joel, Gong, Wenbo
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Wang, Benjie
Jennings, Joel
Gong, Wenbo
author_facet Wang, Benjie
Jennings, Joel
Gong, Wenbo
contents Discovering the underlying relationships among variables from temporal observations has been a longstanding challenge in numerous scientific disciplines, including biology, finance, and climate science. The dynamics of such systems are often best described using continuous-time stochastic processes. Unfortunately, most existing structure learning approaches assume that the underlying process evolves in discrete-time and/or observations occur at regular time intervals. These mismatched assumptions can often lead to incorrect learned structures and models. In this work, we introduce a novel structure learning method, SCOTCH, which combines neural stochastic differential equations (SDE) with variational inference to infer a posterior distribution over possible structures. This continuous-time approach can naturally handle both learning from and predicting observations at arbitrary time points. Theoretically, we establish sufficient conditions for an SDE and SCOTCH to be structurally identifiable, and prove its consistency under infinite data limits. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach leads to improved structure learning performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets compared to relevant baselines under regular and irregular sampling intervals.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_03309
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neural Structure Learning with Stochastic Differential Equations
Wang, Benjie
Jennings, Joel
Gong, Wenbo
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Discovering the underlying relationships among variables from temporal observations has been a longstanding challenge in numerous scientific disciplines, including biology, finance, and climate science. The dynamics of such systems are often best described using continuous-time stochastic processes. Unfortunately, most existing structure learning approaches assume that the underlying process evolves in discrete-time and/or observations occur at regular time intervals. These mismatched assumptions can often lead to incorrect learned structures and models. In this work, we introduce a novel structure learning method, SCOTCH, which combines neural stochastic differential equations (SDE) with variational inference to infer a posterior distribution over possible structures. This continuous-time approach can naturally handle both learning from and predicting observations at arbitrary time points. Theoretically, we establish sufficient conditions for an SDE and SCOTCH to be structurally identifiable, and prove its consistency under infinite data limits. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach leads to improved structure learning performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets compared to relevant baselines under regular and irregular sampling intervals.
title Neural Structure Learning with Stochastic Differential Equations
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.03309