Continuous Bayesian Model Selection for Multivariate Causal Discovery

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Dhir, Anish, Sedgwick, Ruby, Kori, Avinash, Glocker, Ben, van der Wilk, Mark
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Dhir, Anish
Sedgwick, Ruby
Kori, Avinash
Glocker, Ben
van der Wilk, Mark
author_facet Dhir, Anish
Sedgwick, Ruby
Kori, Avinash
Glocker, Ben
van der Wilk, Mark
contents Current causal discovery approaches require restrictive model assumptions in the absence of interventional data to ensure structure identifiability. These assumptions often do not hold in real-world applications leading to a loss of guarantees and poor performance in practice. Recent work has shown that, in the bivariate case, Bayesian model selection can greatly improve performance by exchanging restrictive modelling for more flexible assumptions, at the cost of a small probability of making an error. Our work shows that this approach is useful in the important multivariate case as well. We propose a scalable algorithm leveraging a continuous relaxation of the discrete model selection problem. Specifically, we employ the Causal Gaussian Process Conditional Density Estimator (CGP-CDE) as a Bayesian non-parametric model, using its hyperparameters to construct an adjacency matrix. This matrix is then optimised using the marginal likelihood and an acyclicity regulariser, giving the maximum a posteriori causal graph. We demonstrate the competitiveness of our approach, showing it is advantageous to perform multivariate causal discovery without infeasible assumptions using Bayesian model selection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_10154
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Continuous Bayesian Model Selection for Multivariate Causal Discovery
Dhir, Anish
Sedgwick, Ruby
Kori, Avinash
Glocker, Ben
van der Wilk, Mark
Machine Learning
Current causal discovery approaches require restrictive model assumptions in the absence of interventional data to ensure structure identifiability. These assumptions often do not hold in real-world applications leading to a loss of guarantees and poor performance in practice. Recent work has shown that, in the bivariate case, Bayesian model selection can greatly improve performance by exchanging restrictive modelling for more flexible assumptions, at the cost of a small probability of making an error. Our work shows that this approach is useful in the important multivariate case as well. We propose a scalable algorithm leveraging a continuous relaxation of the discrete model selection problem. Specifically, we employ the Causal Gaussian Process Conditional Density Estimator (CGP-CDE) as a Bayesian non-parametric model, using its hyperparameters to construct an adjacency matrix. This matrix is then optimised using the marginal likelihood and an acyclicity regulariser, giving the maximum a posteriori causal graph. We demonstrate the competitiveness of our approach, showing it is advantageous to perform multivariate causal discovery without infeasible assumptions using Bayesian model selection.
title Continuous Bayesian Model Selection for Multivariate Causal Discovery
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10154