Hybrid Top-Down Global Causal Discovery with Local Search for Linear and Nonlinear Additive Noise Models

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hiremath, Sujai, Maasch, Jacqueline R. M. A., Gao, Mengxiao, Ghosal, Promit, Gan, Kyra
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929672956149760
author Hiremath, Sujai
Maasch, Jacqueline R. M. A.
Gao, Mengxiao
Ghosal, Promit
Gan, Kyra
author_facet Hiremath, Sujai
Maasch, Jacqueline R. M. A.
Gao, Mengxiao
Ghosal, Promit
Gan, Kyra
contents Learning the unique directed acyclic graph corresponding to an unknown causal model is a challenging task. Methods based on functional causal models can identify a unique graph, but either suffer from the curse of dimensionality or impose strong parametric assumptions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel hybrid approach for global causal discovery in observational data that leverages local causal substructures. We first present a topological sorting algorithm that leverages ancestral relationships in linear structural causal models to establish a compact top-down hierarchical ordering, encoding more causal information than linear orderings produced by existing methods. We demonstrate that this approach generalizes to nonlinear settings with arbitrary noise. We then introduce a nonparametric constraint-based algorithm that prunes spurious edges by searching for local conditioning sets, achieving greater accuracy than current methods. We provide theoretical guarantees for correctness and worst-case polynomial time complexities, with empirical validation on synthetic data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_14496
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hybrid Top-Down Global Causal Discovery with Local Search for Linear and Nonlinear Additive Noise Models
Hiremath, Sujai
Maasch, Jacqueline R. M. A.
Gao, Mengxiao
Ghosal, Promit
Gan, Kyra
Machine Learning
Learning the unique directed acyclic graph corresponding to an unknown causal model is a challenging task. Methods based on functional causal models can identify a unique graph, but either suffer from the curse of dimensionality or impose strong parametric assumptions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel hybrid approach for global causal discovery in observational data that leverages local causal substructures. We first present a topological sorting algorithm that leverages ancestral relationships in linear structural causal models to establish a compact top-down hierarchical ordering, encoding more causal information than linear orderings produced by existing methods. We demonstrate that this approach generalizes to nonlinear settings with arbitrary noise. We then introduce a nonparametric constraint-based algorithm that prunes spurious edges by searching for local conditioning sets, achieving greater accuracy than current methods. We provide theoretical guarantees for correctness and worst-case polynomial time complexities, with empirical validation on synthetic data.
title Hybrid Top-Down Global Causal Discovery with Local Search for Linear and Nonlinear Additive Noise Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14496