Causal Discovery from Poisson Branching Structural Causal Model Using High-Order Cumulant with Path Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Qiao, Jie, Xiang, Yu, Chen, Zhengming, Cai, Ruichu, Hao, Zhifeng
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Qiao, Jie
Xiang, Yu
Chen, Zhengming
Cai, Ruichu
Hao, Zhifeng
author_facet Qiao, Jie
Xiang, Yu
Chen, Zhengming
Cai, Ruichu
Hao, Zhifeng
contents Count data naturally arise in many fields, such as finance, neuroscience, and epidemiology, and discovering causal structure among count data is a crucial task in various scientific and industrial scenarios. One of the most common characteristics of count data is the inherent branching structure described by a binomial thinning operator and an independent Poisson distribution that captures both branching and noise. For instance, in a population count scenario, mortality and immigration contribute to the count, where survival follows a Bernoulli distribution, and immigration follows a Poisson distribution. However, causal discovery from such data is challenging due to the non-identifiability issue: a single causal pair is Markov equivalent, i.e., $X\rightarrow Y$ and $Y\rightarrow X$ are distributed equivalent. Fortunately, in this work, we found that the causal order from $X$ to its child $Y$ is identifiable if $X$ is a root vertex and has at least two directed paths to $Y$, or the ancestor of $X$ with the most directed path to $X$ has a directed path to $Y$ without passing $X$. Specifically, we propose a Poisson Branching Structure Causal Model (PB-SCM) and perform a path analysis on PB-SCM using high-order cumulants. Theoretical results establish the connection between the path and cumulant and demonstrate that the path information can be obtained from the cumulant. With the path information, causal order is identifiable under some graphical conditions. A practical algorithm for learning causal structure under PB-SCM is proposed and the experiments demonstrate and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_16523
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal Discovery from Poisson Branching Structural Causal Model Using High-Order Cumulant with Path Analysis
Qiao, Jie
Xiang, Yu
Chen, Zhengming
Cai, Ruichu
Hao, Zhifeng
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Count data naturally arise in many fields, such as finance, neuroscience, and epidemiology, and discovering causal structure among count data is a crucial task in various scientific and industrial scenarios. One of the most common characteristics of count data is the inherent branching structure described by a binomial thinning operator and an independent Poisson distribution that captures both branching and noise. For instance, in a population count scenario, mortality and immigration contribute to the count, where survival follows a Bernoulli distribution, and immigration follows a Poisson distribution. However, causal discovery from such data is challenging due to the non-identifiability issue: a single causal pair is Markov equivalent, i.e., $X\rightarrow Y$ and $Y\rightarrow X$ are distributed equivalent. Fortunately, in this work, we found that the causal order from $X$ to its child $Y$ is identifiable if $X$ is a root vertex and has at least two directed paths to $Y$, or the ancestor of $X$ with the most directed path to $X$ has a directed path to $Y$ without passing $X$. Specifically, we propose a Poisson Branching Structure Causal Model (PB-SCM) and perform a path analysis on PB-SCM using high-order cumulants. Theoretical results establish the connection between the path and cumulant and demonstrate that the path information can be obtained from the cumulant. With the path information, causal order is identifiable under some graphical conditions. A practical algorithm for learning causal structure under PB-SCM is proposed and the experiments demonstrate and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
title Causal Discovery from Poisson Branching Structural Causal Model Using High-Order Cumulant with Path Analysis
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16523