Causal Temporal Representation Learning with Nonstationary Sparse Transition

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Song, Xiangchen, Li, Zijian, Chen, Guangyi, Zheng, Yujia, Fan, Yewen, Dong, Xinshuai, Zhang, Kun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Song, Xiangchen
Li, Zijian
Chen, Guangyi
Zheng, Yujia
Fan, Yewen
Dong, Xinshuai
Zhang, Kun
author_facet Song, Xiangchen
Li, Zijian
Chen, Guangyi
Zheng, Yujia
Fan, Yewen
Dong, Xinshuai
Zhang, Kun
contents Causal Temporal Representation Learning (Ctrl) methods aim to identify the temporal causal dynamics of complex nonstationary temporal sequences. Despite the success of existing Ctrl methods, they require either directly observing the domain variables or assuming a Markov prior on them. Such requirements limit the application of these methods in real-world scenarios when we do not have such prior knowledge of the domain variables. To address this problem, this work adopts a sparse transition assumption, aligned with intuitive human understanding, and presents identifiability results from a theoretical perspective. In particular, we explore under what conditions on the significance of the variability of the transitions we can build a model to identify the distribution shifts. Based on the theoretical result, we introduce a novel framework, Causal Temporal Representation Learning with Nonstationary Sparse Transition (CtrlNS), designed to leverage the constraints on transition sparsity and conditional independence to reliably identify both distribution shifts and latent factors. Our experimental evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate significant improvements over existing baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_03142
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal Temporal Representation Learning with Nonstationary Sparse Transition
Song, Xiangchen
Li, Zijian
Chen, Guangyi
Zheng, Yujia
Fan, Yewen
Dong, Xinshuai
Zhang, Kun
Machine Learning
Causal Temporal Representation Learning (Ctrl) methods aim to identify the temporal causal dynamics of complex nonstationary temporal sequences. Despite the success of existing Ctrl methods, they require either directly observing the domain variables or assuming a Markov prior on them. Such requirements limit the application of these methods in real-world scenarios when we do not have such prior knowledge of the domain variables. To address this problem, this work adopts a sparse transition assumption, aligned with intuitive human understanding, and presents identifiability results from a theoretical perspective. In particular, we explore under what conditions on the significance of the variability of the transitions we can build a model to identify the distribution shifts. Based on the theoretical result, we introduce a novel framework, Causal Temporal Representation Learning with Nonstationary Sparse Transition (CtrlNS), designed to leverage the constraints on transition sparsity and conditional independence to reliably identify both distribution shifts and latent factors. Our experimental evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate significant improvements over existing baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach.
title Causal Temporal Representation Learning with Nonstationary Sparse Transition
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.03142