A Meta-Learning Approach to Bayesian Causal Discovery

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dhir, Anish, Ashman, Matthew, Requeima, James, van der Wilk, Mark
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Dhir, Anish
Ashman, Matthew
Requeima, James
van der Wilk, Mark
author_facet Dhir, Anish
Ashman, Matthew
Requeima, James
van der Wilk, Mark
contents Discovering a unique causal structure is difficult due to both inherent identifiability issues, and the consequences of finite data. As such, uncertainty over causal structures, such as those obtained from a Bayesian posterior, are often necessary for downstream tasks. Finding an accurate approximation to this posterior is challenging, due to the large number of possible causal graphs, as well as the difficulty in the subproblem of finding posteriors over the functional relationships of the causal edges. Recent works have used meta-learning to view the problem of estimating the maximum a-posteriori causal graph as supervised learning. Yet, these methods are limited when estimating the full posterior as they fail to encode key properties of the posterior, such as correlation between edges and permutation equivariance with respect to nodes. Further, these methods also cannot reliably sample from the posterior over causal structures. To address these limitations, we propose a Bayesian meta learning model that allows for sampling causal structures from the posterior and encodes these key properties. We compare our meta-Bayesian causal discovery against existing Bayesian causal discovery methods, demonstrating the advantages of directly learning a posterior over causal structure.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_16577
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Meta-Learning Approach to Bayesian Causal Discovery
Dhir, Anish
Ashman, Matthew
Requeima, James
van der Wilk, Mark
Machine Learning
Methodology
Discovering a unique causal structure is difficult due to both inherent identifiability issues, and the consequences of finite data. As such, uncertainty over causal structures, such as those obtained from a Bayesian posterior, are often necessary for downstream tasks. Finding an accurate approximation to this posterior is challenging, due to the large number of possible causal graphs, as well as the difficulty in the subproblem of finding posteriors over the functional relationships of the causal edges. Recent works have used meta-learning to view the problem of estimating the maximum a-posteriori causal graph as supervised learning. Yet, these methods are limited when estimating the full posterior as they fail to encode key properties of the posterior, such as correlation between edges and permutation equivariance with respect to nodes. Further, these methods also cannot reliably sample from the posterior over causal structures. To address these limitations, we propose a Bayesian meta learning model that allows for sampling causal structures from the posterior and encodes these key properties. We compare our meta-Bayesian causal discovery against existing Bayesian causal discovery methods, demonstrating the advantages of directly learning a posterior over causal structure.
title A Meta-Learning Approach to Bayesian Causal Discovery
topic Machine Learning
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16577