We establish finite-sample guarantees for a polynomial-time algorithm for learning a nonlinear, nonparametric directed acyclic graphical (DAG) model from data. The analysis is model-free and does not assume linearity, additivity, independent noise, or faithfulness. Instead, we impose a condition on the residual variances that is closely related to previous work on linear models with equal variances. Compared to an optimal algorithm with oracle knowledge of the variable ordering, the additional cost of the algorithm is linear in the dimension $d$ and the number of samples $n$. Finally, we compare the proposed algorithm to existing approaches in a simulation study.
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
We propose a kernel method to identify finite mixtures of nonparametric product distributions. It is based on a Hilbert space embedding of the joint distribution. The rank of the constructed tensor is equal to the number of mixture components. We present an algorithm to recover the components by partitioning the data points into clusters such that the variables are jointly conditionally independent given the cluster. This method can be used to identify finite confounders.
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Medical College of Wisconsin（威斯康星医学院）
We provide a new flexible framework for inference with the instrumental variable model. Rather than using linear specifications, functions characterizing the effects of instruments and other explanatory variables are estimated using machine learning via Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART). Error terms and their distribution are inferred using Dirichlet Process mixtures. Simulated and real examples show that when the true functions are linear, little is lost. But when nonlinearities are present, dramatic improvements are obtained with virtually no manual tuning.
We present the Causal Gaussian Process Convolution Model (CGPCM), a doubly nonparametric model for causal, spectrally complex dynamical phenomena. The CGPCM is a generative model in which white noise is passed through a causal, nonparametric-window moving-average filter, a construction that we show to be equivalent to a Gaussian process with a nonparametric kernel that is biased towards causally-generated signals. We develop enhanced variational inference and learning schemes for the CGPCM and its previous acausal variant, the GPCM (Tobar et al., 2015b), that significantly improve statistical …
University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
We investigate the problem of estimating the causal effect of a treatment on individual subjects from observational data, this is a central problem in various application domains, including healthcare, social sciences, and online advertising. Within the Neyman Rubin potential outcomes model, we use the Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence between the estimated and true distributions as a measure of accuracy of the estimate, and we define the information rate of the Bayesian causal inference procedure as the (asymptotic equivalence class of the) expected value of the KL divergence between the estim…
Cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) are at the center of health economic decision making. While these analyses help policy analysts and economists determine coverage, inform policy, and guide resource allocation, they are statistically challenging for several reasons. Cost and effectiveness are correlated and follow complex joint distributions which are difficult to capture parametrically. Effectiveness (often measured as increased survival time) and accumulated cost tends to be right-censored in many applications. Moreover, CEAs are often conducted using observational data with non-random trea…
Warrington College of Business, University of Florida（佛罗里达大学沃顿商学院）；Institute of Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University（清华大学交叉信息研究院）；Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学保罗·G·艾伦计算机科学与工程学院）
Local polynomial regression (Fan and Gijbels 1996) is an important class of methods for nonparametric density estimation and regression problems. However, straightforward implementation of local polynomial regression has quadratic time complexity which hinders its applicability in large-scale data analysis. In this paper, we significantly accelerate the computation of local polynomial estimates by novel applications of multi-dimensional binary indexed trees (Fenwick 1994). Both time and space complexity of our proposed algorithm is nearly linear in the number of input data points. Simulation r…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）
In a nonparametric setting, the causal structure is often identifiable only up to Markov equivalence, and for the purpose of causal inference, it is useful to learn a graphical representation of the Markov equivalence class (MEC). In this paper, we revisit the Greedy Equivalence Search (GES) algorithm, which is widely cited as a score-based algorithm for learning the MEC of the underlying causal structure. We observe that in order to make the GES algorithm consistent in a nonparametric setting, it is not necessary to design a scoring metric that evaluates graphs. Instead, it suffices to plug i…
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health（哈佛大学陈曾熙公共卫生学院）；David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校大卫·格芬医学院）
Imbalance in covariate distributions leads to biased estimates of causal effects. Weighting methods attempt to correct this imbalance but rely on specifying models for the treatment assignment mechanism, which is unknown in observational studies. This leaves researchers to choose the proper weighting method and the appropriate covariate functions for these models without knowing the correct combination to achieve distributional balance. In response to these difficulties, we propose a nonparametric generalization of several other weighting schemes found in the literature: Causal Optimal Transpo…
MIT Economics（麻省理工学院经济学系）；Gatsby Unit, UCL（伦敦大学学院盖茨比研究组）
We propose estimators based on kernel ridge regression for nonparametric causal functions such as dose, heterogeneous, and incremental response curves. Treatment and covariates may be discrete or continuous in general spaces. Due to a decomposition property specific to the RKHS, our estimators have simple closed form solutions. We prove uniform consistency with finite sample rates via original analysis of generalized kernel ridge regression. We extend our main results to counterfactual distributions and to causal functions identified by front and back door criteria. We achieve state-of-the-art…
We propose a nonparametric method for detecting nonlinear causal relationship within a set of multidimensional discrete time series, by using sparse additive models (SpAMs). We show that, when the input to the SpAM is a $β$-mixing time series, the model can be fitted by first approximating each unknown function with a linear combination of a set of B-spline bases, and then solving a group-lasso-type optimization problem with nonconvex regularization. Theoretically, we characterize the oracle statistical properties of the proposed sparse estimator in function estimation and model selection. Num…
