Stable Differentiable Causal Discovery

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Nazaret, Achille, Hong, Justin, Azizi, Elham, Blei, David
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Nazaret, Achille
Hong, Justin
Azizi, Elham
Blei, David
author_facet Nazaret, Achille
Hong, Justin
Azizi, Elham
Blei, David
contents Inferring causal relationships as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) is an important but challenging problem. Differentiable Causal Discovery (DCD) is a promising approach to this problem, framing the search as a continuous optimization. But existing DCD methods are numerically unstable, with poor performance beyond tens of variables. In this paper, we propose Stable Differentiable Causal Discovery (SDCD), a new method that improves previous DCD methods in two ways: (1) It employs an alternative constraint for acyclicity; this constraint is more stable, both theoretically and empirically, and fast to compute. (2) It uses a training procedure tailored for sparse causal graphs, which are common in real-world scenarios. We first derive SDCD and prove its stability and correctness. We then evaluate it with both observational and interventional data and on both small-scale and large-scale settings. We find that SDCD outperforms existing methods in both convergence speed and accuracy and can scale to thousands of variables. We provide code at https://github.com/azizilab/sdcd.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_10263
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stable Differentiable Causal Discovery
Nazaret, Achille
Hong, Justin
Azizi, Elham
Blei, David
Machine Learning
Methodology
Inferring causal relationships as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) is an important but challenging problem. Differentiable Causal Discovery (DCD) is a promising approach to this problem, framing the search as a continuous optimization. But existing DCD methods are numerically unstable, with poor performance beyond tens of variables. In this paper, we propose Stable Differentiable Causal Discovery (SDCD), a new method that improves previous DCD methods in two ways: (1) It employs an alternative constraint for acyclicity; this constraint is more stable, both theoretically and empirically, and fast to compute. (2) It uses a training procedure tailored for sparse causal graphs, which are common in real-world scenarios. We first derive SDCD and prove its stability and correctness. We then evaluate it with both observational and interventional data and on both small-scale and large-scale settings. We find that SDCD outperforms existing methods in both convergence speed and accuracy and can scale to thousands of variables. We provide code at https://github.com/azizilab/sdcd.
title Stable Differentiable Causal Discovery
topic Machine Learning
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10263