We develop a Bregman proximal gradient method for structure learning on linear structural causal models. While the problem is non-convex, has high curvature and is in fact NP-hard, Bregman gradient methods allow us to neutralize at least part of the impact of curvature by measuring smoothness against a highly nonlinear kernel. This allows the method to make longer steps and significantly improves convergence. Each iteration requires solving a Bregman proximal step which is convex and efficiently solvable for our particular choice of kernel. We test our method on various synthetic and real data sets.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
The main approach to defining equivalence among acyclic directed causal graphical models is based on the conditional independence relationships in the distributions that the causal models can generate, in terms of the Markov equivalence. However, it is known that when cycles are allowed in the causal structure, conditional independence may not be a suitable notion for equivalence of two structures, as it does not reflect all the information in the distribution that is useful for identification of the underlying structure. In this paper, we present a general, unified notion of equivalence for l…
Causal structures for observational survival data provide crucial information regarding the relationships between covariates and time-to-event. We derive motivation from the information theoretic source coding argument, and show that incorporating the knowledge of the directed acyclic graph (DAG) can be beneficial if suitable source encoders are employed. As a possible source encoder in this context, we derive a variational inference based conditional variational autoencoder for causal structured survival prediction, which we refer to as DAGSurv. We illustrate the performance of DAGSurv on low…
Graph structured data are abundant in the real world. Among different graph types, directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are of particular interest to machine learning researchers, as many machine learning models are realized as computations on DAGs, including neural networks and Bayesian networks. In this paper, we study deep generative models for DAGs, and propose a novel DAG variational autoencoder (D-VAE). To encode DAGs into the latent space, we leverage graph neural networks. We propose an asynchronous message passing scheme that allows encoding the computations on DAGs, rather than using exist…
Causal relationships among a set of variables are commonly represented by a directed acyclic graph. The orientations of some edges in the causal DAG can be discovered from observational/interventional data. Further edges can be oriented by iteratively applying so-called Meek rules. Inferring edges' orientations from some previously oriented edges, which we call Causal Orientation Learning (COL), is a common problem in various causal discovery tasks. In these tasks, it is often required to solve multiple COL problems and therefore applying Meek rules could be time-consuming. Motivated by Meek r…
We present a method to generate directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) using deep reinforcement learning, specifically deep Q-learning. Generating graphs with specified structures is an important and challenging task in various application fields, however most current graph generation methods produce graphs with undirected edges. We demonstrate that this method is capable of generating DAGs with topology and node types satisfying specified criteria in highly sparse reward environments.
Obtaining continuous representations of structural data such as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) has gained attention in machine learning and artificial intelligence. However, embedding complex DAGs in which both ancestors and descendants of nodes are exponentially increasing is difficult. Tackling in this problem, we develop Disk Embeddings, which is a framework for embedding DAGs into quasi-metric spaces. Existing state-of-the-art methods, Order Embeddings and Hyperbolic Entailment Cones, are instances of Disk Embedding in Euclidean space and spheres respectively. Furthermore, we propose a nov…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health（哈佛陈曾熙公共卫生学院）
Missing data is a pervasive problem in data analyses, resulting in datasets that contain censored realizations of a target distribution. Many approaches to inference on the target distribution using censored observed data, rely on missing data models represented as a factorization with respect to a directed acyclic graph. In this paper we consider the identifiability of the target distribution within this class of models, and show that the most general identification strategies proposed so far retain a significant gap in that they fail to identify a wide class of identifiable distributions. To…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学）
Directed acyclic graph (DAG) models are widely used to represent causal relationships among random variables in many application domains. This paper studies a special class of non-Gaussian DAG models, where the conditional variance of each node given its parents is a quadratic function of its conditional mean. Such a class of non-Gaussian DAG models are fairly flexible and admit many popular distributions as special cases, including Poisson, Binomial, Geometric, Exponential, and Gamma. To facilitate learning, we introduce a novel concept of topological layers, and develop an efficient DAG lear…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学）
Acyclic model, often depicted as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), has been widely employed to represent directional causal relations among collected nodes. In this article, we propose an efficient method to learn linear non-Gaussian DAG in high dimensional cases, where the noises can be of any continuous non-Gaussian distribution. This is in sharp contrast to most existing DAG learning methods assuming Gaussian noise with additional variance assumptions to attain exact DAG recovery. The proposed method leverages a novel concept of topological layer to facilitate the DAG learning. Particularly, …
Åbo Akademi University（奥布学术大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）；University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）
We introduce a novel class of labeled directed acyclic graph (LDAG) models for finite sets of discrete variables. LDAGs generalize earlier proposals for allowing local structures in the conditional probability distribution of a node, such that unrestricted label sets determine which edges can be deleted from the underlying directed acyclic graph (DAG) for a given context. Several properties of these models are derived, including a generalization of the concept of Markov equivalence classes. Efficient Bayesian learning of LDAGs is enabled by introducing an LDAG-based factorization of the Dirich…
This supplementary material includes three parts: some preliminary results, four examples, an experiment, three new algorithms, and all proofs of the results in the paper "Reversible MCMC on Markov equivalence classes of sparse directed acyclic graphs".
This paper considers the problem of estimating the structure of multiple related directed acyclic graph (DAG) models. Building on recent developments in exact estimation of DAGs using integer linear programming (ILP), we present an ILP approach for joint estimation over multiple DAGs, that does not require that the vertices in each DAG share a common ordering. Furthermore, we allow also for (potentially unknown) dependency structure between the DAGs. Results are presented on both simulated data and fMRI data obtained from multiple subjects.
Boston University（波士顿大学）；Systems & Technology Research（系统与技术研究公司）
We study the problem of reducing test-time acquisition costs in classification systems. Our goal is to learn decision rules that adaptively select sensors for each example as necessary to make a confident prediction. We model our system as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where internal nodes correspond to sensor subsets and decision functions at each node choose whether to acquire a new sensor or classify using the available measurements. This problem can be naturally posed as an empirical risk minimization over training data. Rather than jointly optimizing such a highly coupled and non-convex …
We introduce a new class of identifiable DAG models where the conditional distribution of each node given its parents belongs to a family of generalized hypergeometric distributions (GHD). A family of generalized hypergeometric distributions includes a lot of discrete distributions such as the binomial, Beta-binomial, negative binomial, Poisson, hyper-Poisson, and many more. We prove that if the data drawn from the new class of DAG models, one can fully identify the graph structure. We further present a reliable and polynomial-time algorithm that recovers the graph from finitely many data. We …
In this paper, we explore and detail our experiments in a high-dimensionality, multi-class image classification problem often found in the automatic recognition of Sign Languages. Here, our efforts are directed towards comparing the characteristics, advantages and drawbacks of creating and training Support Vector Machines disposed in a Directed Acyclic Graph and Artificial Neural Networks to classify signs from the Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS). We explore how the different heuristics, hyperparameters and multi-class decision schemes affect the performance, efficiency and ease of use for ea…
We provide a correction to the expression for scoring Gaussian directed acyclic graphical models derived in Geiger and Heckerman [Ann. Statist. 30 (2002) 1414-1440] and discuss how to evaluate the score efficiently.
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Amazon Web Services（亚马逊云科技）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；ServiceNow
Recently continuous relaxations have been proposed in order to learn Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) from data by backpropagation, instead of using combinatorial optimization. However, a number of techniques for fully discrete backpropagation could instead be applied. In this paper, we explore that direction and propose DAG-DB, a framework for learning DAGs by Discrete Backpropagation. Based on the architecture of Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation [I-MLE, arXiv:2106.01798], DAG-DB adopts a probabilistic approach to the problem, sampling binary adjacency matrices from an implicit probabilit…
Different directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) may be Markov equivalent in the sense that they entail the same conditional independence relations among the observed variables. Meek (1995) characterizes Markov equivalence classes for DAGs (with no latent variables) by presenting a set of orientation rules that can correctly identify all arrow orientations shared by all DAGs in a Markov equivalence class, given a member of that class. For DAG models with latent variables, maximal ancestral graphs (MAGs) provide a neat representation that facilitates model search. Earlier work (Ali et al. 2005) has ide…
Greedy algorithms have long been a workhorse for learning graphical models, and more broadly for learning statistical models with sparse structure. In the context of learning directed acyclic graphs, greedy algorithms are popular despite their worst-case exponential runtime. In practice, however, they are very efficient. We provide new insight into this phenomenon by studying a general greedy score-based algorithm for learning DAGs. Unlike edge-greedy algorithms such as the popular GES and hill-climbing algorithms, our approach is vertex-greedy and requires at most a polynomial number of score…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Northwestern University（西北大学）
Learning directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from data is a challenging task both in theory and in practice, because the number of possible DAGs scales superexponentially with the number of nodes. In this paper, we study the problem of learning an optimal DAG from continuous observational data. We cast this problem in the form of a mathematical programming model which can naturally incorporate a super-structure in order to reduce the set of possible candidate DAGs. We use the penalized negative log-likelihood score function with both $\ell_0$ and $\ell_1$ regularizations and propose a new mixed-int…
We introduce a new family of graphical models that consists of graphs with possibly directed, undirected and bidirected edges but without directed cycles. We show that these models are suitable for representing causal models with additive error terms. We provide a set of sufficient graphical criteria for the identification of arbitrary causal effects when the new models contain directed and undirected edges but no bidirected edge. We also provide a necessary and sufficient graphical criterion for the identification of the causal effect of a single variable on the rest of the variables. Moreove…
We extend Andersson-Madigan-Perlman chain graphs by (i) relaxing the semidirected acyclity constraint so that only directed cycles are forbidden, and (ii) allowing up to two edges between any pair of nodes. We introduce global, and ordered local and pairwise Markov properties for the new models. We show the equivalence of these properties for strictly positive probability distributions. We also show that when the random variables are continuous, the new models can be interpreted as systems of structural equations with correlated errors. This enables us to adapt Pearl's do-calculus to them. Fin…
Bayesian networks, with structure given by a directed acyclic graph (DAG), are a popular class of graphical models. However, learning Bayesian networks from discrete or categorical data is particularly challenging, due to the large parameter space and the difficulty in searching for a sparse structure. In this article, we develop a maximum penalized likelihood method to tackle this problem. Instead of the commonly used multinomial distribution, we model the conditional distribution of a node given its parents by multi-logit regression, in which an edge is parameterized by a set of coefficient …
The main contribution of this article is a new prior distribution over directed acyclic graphs, which gives larger weight to sparse graphs. This distribution is intended for structured Bayesian networks, where the structure is given by an ordered block model. That is, the nodes of the graph are objects which fall into categories (or blocks); the blocks have a natural ordering. The presence of a relationship between two objects is denoted by an arrow, from the object of lower category to the object of higher category. The models considered here were introduced in Kemp et al. (2004) for relation…
The sizes of Markov equivalence classes of directed acyclic graphs play important roles in measuring the uncertainty and complexity in causal learning. A Markov equivalence class can be represented by an essential graph and its undirected subgraphs determine the size of the class. In this paper, we develop a method to derive the formulas for counting the sizes of Markov equivalence classes. We first introduce a new concept of core graph. The size of a Markov equivalence class of interest is a polynomial of the number of vertices given its core graph. Then, we discuss the recursive and explicit…
We study a family of regularized score-based estimators for learning the structure of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) for a multivariate normal distribution from high-dimensional data with $p\gg n$. Our main results establish support recovery guarantees and deviation bounds for a family of penalized least-squares estimators under concave regularization without assuming prior knowledge of a variable ordering. These results apply to a variety of practical situations that allow for arbitrary nondegenerate covariance structures as well as many popular regularizers including the MCP, SCAD, $\ell_{0}…
Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are commonly used to represent causal relationships among random variables in graphical models. Applications of these models arise in the study of physical, as well as biological systems, where directed edges between nodes represent the influence of components of the system on each other. The general problem of estimating DAGs from observed data is computationally NP-hard, Moreover two directed graphs may be observationally equivalent. When the nodes exhibit a natural ordering, the problem of estimating directed graphs reduces to the problem of estimating the str…
Probabilistic graphical models are graphical representations of probability distributions. Graphical models have applications in many fields including biology, social sciences, linguistic, neuroscience. In this paper, we propose directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) learning via bootstrap aggregating. The proposed procedure is named as DAGBag. Specifically, an ensemble of DAGs is first learned based on bootstrap resamples of the data and then an aggregated DAG is derived by minimizing the overall distance to the entire ensemble. A family of metrics based on the structural hamming distance is defined …
Identifiability of the minimum-trace directed acyclic graph and hill climbing algorithms without strict local optima under weakly increasing error variances
