Differentiable Causal Discovery For Latent Hierarchical Causal Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Prashant, Parjanya, Ng, Ignavier, Zhang, Kun, Huang, Biwei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Prashant, Parjanya
Ng, Ignavier
Zhang, Kun
Huang, Biwei
author_facet Prashant, Parjanya
Ng, Ignavier
Zhang, Kun
Huang, Biwei
contents Discovering causal structures with latent variables from observational data is a fundamental challenge in causal discovery. Existing methods often rely on constraint-based, iterative discrete searches, limiting their scalability to large numbers of variables. Moreover, these methods frequently assume linearity or invertibility, restricting their applicability to real-world scenarios. We present new theoretical results on the identifiability of nonlinear latent hierarchical causal models, relaxing previous assumptions in literature about the deterministic nature of latent variables and exogenous noise. Building on these insights, we develop a novel differentiable causal discovery algorithm that efficiently estimates the structure of such models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a differentiable causal discovery method for nonlinear latent hierarchical models. Our approach outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and scalability. We demonstrate its practical utility by learning interpretable hierarchical latent structures from high-dimensional image data and demonstrate its effectiveness on downstream tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_19556
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Differentiable Causal Discovery For Latent Hierarchical Causal Models
Prashant, Parjanya
Ng, Ignavier
Zhang, Kun
Huang, Biwei
Machine Learning
Discovering causal structures with latent variables from observational data is a fundamental challenge in causal discovery. Existing methods often rely on constraint-based, iterative discrete searches, limiting their scalability to large numbers of variables. Moreover, these methods frequently assume linearity or invertibility, restricting their applicability to real-world scenarios. We present new theoretical results on the identifiability of nonlinear latent hierarchical causal models, relaxing previous assumptions in literature about the deterministic nature of latent variables and exogenous noise. Building on these insights, we develop a novel differentiable causal discovery algorithm that efficiently estimates the structure of such models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a differentiable causal discovery method for nonlinear latent hierarchical models. Our approach outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and scalability. We demonstrate its practical utility by learning interpretable hierarchical latent structures from high-dimensional image data and demonstrate its effectiveness on downstream tasks.
title Differentiable Causal Discovery For Latent Hierarchical Causal Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.19556