Learning Cyclic Causal Models from Incomplete Data

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Sethuraman, Muralikrishnna G., Fekri, Faramarz
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909119764496384
author Sethuraman, Muralikrishnna G.
Fekri, Faramarz
author_facet Sethuraman, Muralikrishnna G.
Fekri, Faramarz
contents Causal learning is a fundamental problem in statistics and science, offering insights into predicting the effects of unseen treatments on a system. Despite recent advances in this topic, most existing causal discovery algorithms operate under two key assumptions: (i) the underlying graph is acyclic, and (ii) the available data is complete. These assumptions can be problematic as many real-world systems contain feedback loops (e.g., biological systems), and practical scenarios frequently involve missing data. In this work, we propose a novel framework, named MissNODAGS, for learning cyclic causal graphs from partially missing data. Under the additive noise model, MissNODAGS learns the causal graph by alternating between imputing the missing data and maximizing the expected log-likelihood of the visible part of the data in each training step, following the principles of the expectation-maximization (EM) framework. Through synthetic experiments and real-world single-cell perturbation data, we demonstrate improved performance when compared to using state-of-the-art imputation techniques followed by causal learning on partially missing interventional data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_15625
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Cyclic Causal Models from Incomplete Data
Sethuraman, Muralikrishnna G.
Fekri, Faramarz
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Causal learning is a fundamental problem in statistics and science, offering insights into predicting the effects of unseen treatments on a system. Despite recent advances in this topic, most existing causal discovery algorithms operate under two key assumptions: (i) the underlying graph is acyclic, and (ii) the available data is complete. These assumptions can be problematic as many real-world systems contain feedback loops (e.g., biological systems), and practical scenarios frequently involve missing data. In this work, we propose a novel framework, named MissNODAGS, for learning cyclic causal graphs from partially missing data. Under the additive noise model, MissNODAGS learns the causal graph by alternating between imputing the missing data and maximizing the expected log-likelihood of the visible part of the data in each training step, following the principles of the expectation-maximization (EM) framework. Through synthetic experiments and real-world single-cell perturbation data, we demonstrate improved performance when compared to using state-of-the-art imputation techniques followed by causal learning on partially missing interventional data.
title Learning Cyclic Causal Models from Incomplete Data
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15625