Interventional Causal Structure Discovery over Graphical Models with Convergence and Optimality Guarantees

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chengbo, Qiu, Kai, Yang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Chengbo, Qiu
Kai, Yang
author_facet Chengbo, Qiu
Kai, Yang
contents Learning causal structure from sampled data is a fundamental problem with applications in various fields, including healthcare, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Traditional methods predominantly rely on observational data, but there exist limits regarding the identifiability of causal structures with only observational data. Interventional data, on the other hand, helps establish a cause-and-effect relationship by breaking the influence of confounding variables. It remains to date under-explored to develop a mathematical framework that seamlessly integrates both observational and interventional data in causal structure learning. Furthermore, existing studies often focus on centralized approaches, necessitating the transfer of entire datasets to a single server, which lead to considerable communication overhead and heightened risks to privacy. To tackle these challenges, we develop a bilevel polynomial optimization (Bloom) framework. Bloom not only provides a powerful mathematical modeling framework, underpinned by theoretical support, for causal structure discovery from both interventional and observational data, but also aspires to an efficient causal discovery algorithm with convergence and optimality guarantees. We further extend Bloom to a distributed setting to reduce the communication overhead and mitigate data privacy risks. It is seen through experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets that Bloom markedly surpasses other leading learning algorithms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_04819
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Interventional Causal Structure Discovery over Graphical Models with Convergence and Optimality Guarantees
Chengbo, Qiu
Kai, Yang
Machine Learning
Learning causal structure from sampled data is a fundamental problem with applications in various fields, including healthcare, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Traditional methods predominantly rely on observational data, but there exist limits regarding the identifiability of causal structures with only observational data. Interventional data, on the other hand, helps establish a cause-and-effect relationship by breaking the influence of confounding variables. It remains to date under-explored to develop a mathematical framework that seamlessly integrates both observational and interventional data in causal structure learning. Furthermore, existing studies often focus on centralized approaches, necessitating the transfer of entire datasets to a single server, which lead to considerable communication overhead and heightened risks to privacy. To tackle these challenges, we develop a bilevel polynomial optimization (Bloom) framework. Bloom not only provides a powerful mathematical modeling framework, underpinned by theoretical support, for causal structure discovery from both interventional and observational data, but also aspires to an efficient causal discovery algorithm with convergence and optimality guarantees. We further extend Bloom to a distributed setting to reduce the communication overhead and mitigate data privacy risks. It is seen through experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets that Bloom markedly surpasses other leading learning algorithms.
title Interventional Causal Structure Discovery over Graphical Models with Convergence and Optimality Guarantees
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.04819