Conditional Generative Models are Sufficient to Sample from Any Causal Effect Estimand

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Autori principali: Rahman, Md Musfiqur, Jordan, Matt, Kocaoglu, Murat
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Rahman, Md Musfiqur
Jordan, Matt
Kocaoglu, Murat
author_facet Rahman, Md Musfiqur
Jordan, Matt
Kocaoglu, Murat
contents Causal inference from observational data plays critical role in many applications in trustworthy machine learning. While sound and complete algorithms exist to compute causal effects, many of them assume access to conditional likelihoods, which is difficult to estimate for high-dimensional (particularly image) data. Researchers have alleviated this issue by simulating causal relations with neural models. However, when we have high-dimensional variables in the causal graph along with some unobserved confounders, no existing work can effectively sample from the un/conditional interventional distributions. In this work, we show how to sample from any identifiable interventional distribution given an arbitrary causal graph through a sequence of push-forward computations of conditional generative models, such as diffusion models. Our proposed algorithm follows the recursive steps of the existing likelihood-based identification algorithms to train a set of feed-forward models, and connect them in a specific way to sample from the desired distribution. We conduct experiments on a Colored MNIST dataset having both the treatment ($X$) and the target variables ($Y$) as images and sample from $P(y|do(x))$. Our algorithm also enables us to conduct a causal analysis to evaluate spurious correlations among input features of generative models pre-trained on the CelebA dataset. Finally, we generate high-dimensional interventional samples from the MIMIC-CXR dataset involving text and image variables.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_07419
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Conditional Generative Models are Sufficient to Sample from Any Causal Effect Estimand
Rahman, Md Musfiqur
Jordan, Matt
Kocaoglu, Murat
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Methodology
Causal inference from observational data plays critical role in many applications in trustworthy machine learning. While sound and complete algorithms exist to compute causal effects, many of them assume access to conditional likelihoods, which is difficult to estimate for high-dimensional (particularly image) data. Researchers have alleviated this issue by simulating causal relations with neural models. However, when we have high-dimensional variables in the causal graph along with some unobserved confounders, no existing work can effectively sample from the un/conditional interventional distributions. In this work, we show how to sample from any identifiable interventional distribution given an arbitrary causal graph through a sequence of push-forward computations of conditional generative models, such as diffusion models. Our proposed algorithm follows the recursive steps of the existing likelihood-based identification algorithms to train a set of feed-forward models, and connect them in a specific way to sample from the desired distribution. We conduct experiments on a Colored MNIST dataset having both the treatment ($X$) and the target variables ($Y$) as images and sample from $P(y|do(x))$. Our algorithm also enables us to conduct a causal analysis to evaluate spurious correlations among input features of generative models pre-trained on the CelebA dataset. Finally, we generate high-dimensional interventional samples from the MIMIC-CXR dataset involving text and image variables.
title Conditional Generative Models are Sufficient to Sample from Any Causal Effect Estimand
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07419