Marrying Causal Representation Learning with Dynamical Systems for Science

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yao, Dingling, Muller, Caroline, Locatello, Francesco
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Yao, Dingling
Muller, Caroline
Locatello, Francesco
author_facet Yao, Dingling
Muller, Caroline
Locatello, Francesco
contents Causal representation learning promises to extend causal models to hidden causal variables from raw entangled measurements. However, most progress has focused on proving identifiability results in different settings, and we are not aware of any successful real-world application. At the same time, the field of dynamical systems benefited from deep learning and scaled to countless applications but does not allow parameter identification. In this paper, we draw a clear connection between the two and their key assumptions, allowing us to apply identifiable methods developed in causal representation learning to dynamical systems. At the same time, we can leverage scalable differentiable solvers developed for differential equations to build models that are both identifiable and practical. Overall, we learn explicitly controllable models that isolate the trajectory-specific parameters for further downstream tasks such as out-of-distribution classification or treatment effect estimation. We experiment with a wind simulator with partially known factors of variation. We also apply the resulting model to real-world climate data and successfully answer downstream causal questions in line with existing literature on climate change.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_13888
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Marrying Causal Representation Learning with Dynamical Systems for Science
Yao, Dingling
Muller, Caroline
Locatello, Francesco
Machine Learning
Causal representation learning promises to extend causal models to hidden causal variables from raw entangled measurements. However, most progress has focused on proving identifiability results in different settings, and we are not aware of any successful real-world application. At the same time, the field of dynamical systems benefited from deep learning and scaled to countless applications but does not allow parameter identification. In this paper, we draw a clear connection between the two and their key assumptions, allowing us to apply identifiable methods developed in causal representation learning to dynamical systems. At the same time, we can leverage scalable differentiable solvers developed for differential equations to build models that are both identifiable and practical. Overall, we learn explicitly controllable models that isolate the trajectory-specific parameters for further downstream tasks such as out-of-distribution classification or treatment effect estimation. We experiment with a wind simulator with partially known factors of variation. We also apply the resulting model to real-world climate data and successfully answer downstream causal questions in line with existing literature on climate change.
title Marrying Causal Representation Learning with Dynamical Systems for Science
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.13888