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Main Authors: Tse, Tim, Chen, Zhitang, Zhu, Shengyu, Liu, Yue
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.18017
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author Tse, Tim
Chen, Zhitang
Zhu, Shengyu
Liu, Yue
author_facet Tse, Tim
Chen, Zhitang
Zhu, Shengyu
Liu, Yue
contents The discovery of causal relationships in a set of random variables is a fundamental objective of science and has also recently been argued as being an essential component towards real machine intelligence. One class of causal discovery techniques are founded based on the argument that there are inherent structural asymmetries between the causal and anti-causal direction which could be leveraged in determining the direction of causation. To go about capturing these discrepancies between cause and effect remains to be a challenge and many current state-of-the-art algorithms propose to compare the norms of the kernel mean embeddings of the conditional distributions. In this work, we argue that such approaches based on RKHS embeddings are insufficient in capturing principal markers of cause-effect asymmetry involving higher-order structural variabilities of the conditional distributions. We propose Kernel Intrinsic Invariance Measure with Heterogeneous Transform (KIIM-HT) which introduces a novel score measure based on heterogeneous transformation of RKHS embeddings to extract relevant higher-order moments of the conditional densities for causal discovery. Inference is made via comparing the score of each hypothetical cause-effect direction. Tests and comparisons on a synthetic dataset, a two-dimensional synthetic dataset and the real-world benchmark dataset Tübingen Cause-Effect Pairs verify our approach. In addition, we conduct a sensitivity analysis to the regularization parameter to faithfully compare previous work to our method and an experiment with trials on varied hyperparameter values to showcase the robustness of our algorithm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_18017
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal Discovery by Kernel Deviance Measures with Heterogeneous Transforms
Tse, Tim
Chen, Zhitang
Zhu, Shengyu
Liu, Yue
Machine Learning
The discovery of causal relationships in a set of random variables is a fundamental objective of science and has also recently been argued as being an essential component towards real machine intelligence. One class of causal discovery techniques are founded based on the argument that there are inherent structural asymmetries between the causal and anti-causal direction which could be leveraged in determining the direction of causation. To go about capturing these discrepancies between cause and effect remains to be a challenge and many current state-of-the-art algorithms propose to compare the norms of the kernel mean embeddings of the conditional distributions. In this work, we argue that such approaches based on RKHS embeddings are insufficient in capturing principal markers of cause-effect asymmetry involving higher-order structural variabilities of the conditional distributions. We propose Kernel Intrinsic Invariance Measure with Heterogeneous Transform (KIIM-HT) which introduces a novel score measure based on heterogeneous transformation of RKHS embeddings to extract relevant higher-order moments of the conditional densities for causal discovery. Inference is made via comparing the score of each hypothetical cause-effect direction. Tests and comparisons on a synthetic dataset, a two-dimensional synthetic dataset and the real-world benchmark dataset Tübingen Cause-Effect Pairs verify our approach. In addition, we conduct a sensitivity analysis to the regularization parameter to faithfully compare previous work to our method and an experiment with trials on varied hyperparameter values to showcase the robustness of our algorithm.
title Causal Discovery by Kernel Deviance Measures with Heterogeneous Transforms
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.18017