Amortized Inference of Causal Models via Conditional Fixed-Point Iterations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Mahajan, Divyat, Gladrow, Jannes, Hilmkil, Agrin, Zhang, Cheng, Scetbon, Meyer
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Mahajan, Divyat
Gladrow, Jannes
Hilmkil, Agrin
Zhang, Cheng
Scetbon, Meyer
author_facet Mahajan, Divyat
Gladrow, Jannes
Hilmkil, Agrin
Zhang, Cheng
Scetbon, Meyer
contents Structural Causal Models (SCMs) offer a principled framework to reason about interventions and support out-of-distribution generalization, which are key goals in scientific discovery. However, the task of learning SCMs from observed data poses formidable challenges, and often requires training a separate model for each dataset. In this work, we propose an amortized inference framework that trains a single model to predict the causal mechanisms of SCMs conditioned on their observational data and causal graph. We first use a transformer-based architecture for amortized learning of dataset embeddings, and then extend the Fixed-Point Approach (FiP) to infer the causal mechanisms conditionally on their dataset embeddings. As a byproduct, our method can generate observational and interventional data from novel SCMs at inference time, without updating parameters. Empirical results show that our amortized procedure performs on par with baselines trained specifically for each dataset on both in and out-of-distribution problems, and also outperforms them in scarce data regimes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_06128
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Amortized Inference of Causal Models via Conditional Fixed-Point Iterations
Mahajan, Divyat
Gladrow, Jannes
Hilmkil, Agrin
Zhang, Cheng
Scetbon, Meyer
Machine Learning
Structural Causal Models (SCMs) offer a principled framework to reason about interventions and support out-of-distribution generalization, which are key goals in scientific discovery. However, the task of learning SCMs from observed data poses formidable challenges, and often requires training a separate model for each dataset. In this work, we propose an amortized inference framework that trains a single model to predict the causal mechanisms of SCMs conditioned on their observational data and causal graph. We first use a transformer-based architecture for amortized learning of dataset embeddings, and then extend the Fixed-Point Approach (FiP) to infer the causal mechanisms conditionally on their dataset embeddings. As a byproduct, our method can generate observational and interventional data from novel SCMs at inference time, without updating parameters. Empirical results show that our amortized procedure performs on par with baselines trained specifically for each dataset on both in and out-of-distribution problems, and also outperforms them in scarce data regimes.
title Amortized Inference of Causal Models via Conditional Fixed-Point Iterations
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06128