Unsupervised Pairwise Causal Discovery on Heterogeneous Data using Mutual Information Measures

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Trilla, Alexandre, Mijatovic, Nenad
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Trilla, Alexandre
Mijatovic, Nenad
author_facet Trilla, Alexandre
Mijatovic, Nenad
contents A fundamental task in science is to determine the underlying causal relations because it is the knowledge of this functional structure what leads to the correct interpretation of an effect given the apparent associations in the observed data. In this sense, Causal Discovery is a technique that tackles this challenge by analyzing the statistical properties of the constituent variables. In this work, we target the generalizability of the discovery method by following a reductionist approach that only involves two variables, i.e., the pairwise or bi-variate setting. We question the current (possibly misleading) baseline results on the basis that they were obtained through supervised learning, which is arguably contrary to this genuinely exploratory endeavor. In consequence, we approach this problem in an unsupervised way, using robust Mutual Information measures, and observing the impact of the different variable types, which is oftentimes ignored in the design of solutions. Thus, we provide a novel set of standard unbiased results that can serve as a reference to guide future discovery tasks in completely unknown environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_00399
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unsupervised Pairwise Causal Discovery on Heterogeneous Data using Mutual Information Measures
Trilla, Alexandre
Mijatovic, Nenad
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Methodology
A fundamental task in science is to determine the underlying causal relations because it is the knowledge of this functional structure what leads to the correct interpretation of an effect given the apparent associations in the observed data. In this sense, Causal Discovery is a technique that tackles this challenge by analyzing the statistical properties of the constituent variables. In this work, we target the generalizability of the discovery method by following a reductionist approach that only involves two variables, i.e., the pairwise or bi-variate setting. We question the current (possibly misleading) baseline results on the basis that they were obtained through supervised learning, which is arguably contrary to this genuinely exploratory endeavor. In consequence, we approach this problem in an unsupervised way, using robust Mutual Information measures, and observing the impact of the different variable types, which is oftentimes ignored in the design of solutions. Thus, we provide a novel set of standard unbiased results that can serve as a reference to guide future discovery tasks in completely unknown environments.
title Unsupervised Pairwise Causal Discovery on Heterogeneous Data using Mutual Information Measures
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00399