Causal Discovery on Dependent Binary Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Chen, Alex, Zhou, Qing
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Chen, Alex
Zhou, Qing
author_facet Chen, Alex
Zhou, Qing
contents The assumption of independence between observations (units) in a dataset is prevalent across various methodologies for learning causal graphical models. However, this assumption often finds itself in conflict with real-world data, posing challenges to accurate structure learning. We propose a decorrelation-based approach for causal graph learning on dependent binary data, where the local conditional distribution is defined by a latent utility model with dependent errors across units. We develop a pairwise maximum likelihood method to estimate the covariance matrix for the dependence among the units. Then, leveraging the estimated covariance matrix, we develop an EM-like iterative algorithm to generate and decorrelate samples of the latent utility variables, which serve as decorrelated data. Any standard causal discovery method can be applied on the decorrelated data to learn the underlying causal graph. We demonstrate that the proposed decorrelation approach significantly improves the accuracy in causal graph learning, through numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_20289
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal Discovery on Dependent Binary Data
Chen, Alex
Zhou, Qing
Machine Learning
Methodology
The assumption of independence between observations (units) in a dataset is prevalent across various methodologies for learning causal graphical models. However, this assumption often finds itself in conflict with real-world data, posing challenges to accurate structure learning. We propose a decorrelation-based approach for causal graph learning on dependent binary data, where the local conditional distribution is defined by a latent utility model with dependent errors across units. We develop a pairwise maximum likelihood method to estimate the covariance matrix for the dependence among the units. Then, leveraging the estimated covariance matrix, we develop an EM-like iterative algorithm to generate and decorrelate samples of the latent utility variables, which serve as decorrelated data. Any standard causal discovery method can be applied on the decorrelated data to learn the underlying causal graph. We demonstrate that the proposed decorrelation approach significantly improves the accuracy in causal graph learning, through numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
title Causal Discovery on Dependent Binary Data
topic Machine Learning
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20289