Causal Structure and Representation Learning with Biomedical Applications

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Uhler, Caroline, Zhang, Jiaqi
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Uhler, Caroline
Zhang, Jiaqi
author_facet Uhler, Caroline
Zhang, Jiaqi
contents Massive data collection holds the promise of a better understanding of complex phenomena and, ultimately, better decisions. Representation learning has become a key driver of deep learning applications, as it allows learning latent spaces that capture important properties of the data without requiring any supervised annotations. Although representation learning has been hugely successful in predictive tasks, it can fail miserably in causal tasks including predicting the effect of a perturbation/intervention. This calls for a marriage between representation learning and causal inference. An exciting opportunity in this regard stems from the growing availability of multi-modal data (observational and perturbational, imaging-based and sequencing-based, at the single-cell level, tissue-level, and organism-level). We outline a statistical and computational framework for causal structure and representation learning motivated by fundamental biomedical questions: how to effectively use observational and perturbational data to perform causal discovery on observed causal variables; how to use multi-modal views of the system to learn causal variables; and how to design optimal perturbations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_04790
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal Structure and Representation Learning with Biomedical Applications
Uhler, Caroline
Zhang, Jiaqi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Massive data collection holds the promise of a better understanding of complex phenomena and, ultimately, better decisions. Representation learning has become a key driver of deep learning applications, as it allows learning latent spaces that capture important properties of the data without requiring any supervised annotations. Although representation learning has been hugely successful in predictive tasks, it can fail miserably in causal tasks including predicting the effect of a perturbation/intervention. This calls for a marriage between representation learning and causal inference. An exciting opportunity in this regard stems from the growing availability of multi-modal data (observational and perturbational, imaging-based and sequencing-based, at the single-cell level, tissue-level, and organism-level). We outline a statistical and computational framework for causal structure and representation learning motivated by fundamental biomedical questions: how to effectively use observational and perturbational data to perform causal discovery on observed causal variables; how to use multi-modal views of the system to learn causal variables; and how to design optimal perturbations.
title Causal Structure and Representation Learning with Biomedical Applications
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04790