As causal ground truth is incredibly rare, causal discovery algorithms are commonly only evaluated on simulated data. This is concerning, given that simulations reflect preconceptions about generating processes regarding noise distributions, model classes, and more. In this work, we propose a novel method for falsifying the output of a causal discovery algorithm in the absence of ground truth. Our key insight is that while statistical learning seeks stability across subsets of data points, causal learning should seek stability across subsets of variables. Motivated by this insight, our method relies on a notion of compatibility between causal graphs learned on different subsets of variables. We prove that detecting incompatibilities can falsify wrongly inferred causal relations due to violation of assumptions or errors from finite sample effects. Although passing such compatibility tests is only a necessary criterion for good performance, we argue that it provides strong evidence for the causal models whenever compatibility entails strong implications for the joint distribution. We also demonstrate experimentally that detection of incompatibilities can aid in causal model selection.
The causal compatibility question asks whether a given causal structure graph -- possibly involving latent variables -- constitutes a genuinely plausible causal explanation for a given probability distribution over the graph's observed variables. Algorithms predicated on merely necessary constraints for causal compatibility typically suffer from false negatives, i.e. they admit incompatible distributions as apparently compatible with the given graph. In [arXiv:1609.00672], one of us introduced the inflation technique for formulating useful relaxations of the causal compatibility problem in ter…
Within the field of causal inference, it is desirable to learn the structure of causal relationships holding between a system of variables from the correlations that these variables exhibit; a sub-problem of which is to certify whether or not a given causal hypothesis is compatible with the observed correlations. A particularly challenging setting for assessing causal compatibility is in the presence of partial information; i.e. when some of the variables are hidden/latent. This paper introduces the possible worlds framework as a method for deciding causal compatibility in this difficult setti…
There are many different causal effect estimators in causal inference. However, it is unclear how to choose between these estimators because there is no ground-truth for causal effects. A commonly used option is to simulate synthetic data, where the ground-truth is known. However, the best causal estimators on synthetic data are unlikely to be the best causal estimators on real data. An ideal benchmark for causal estimators would both (a) yield ground-truth values of the causal effects and (b) be representative of real data. Using flexible generative models, we provide a benchmark that both yi…
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics（圆周理论物理研究所）；Universidad Complutense de Madrid（马德里康普顿斯大学）；ICFO-Institut de Ciències Fotòniques, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology（巴塞罗那科学技术学院光子科学研究所）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；ICREA（加泰罗尼亚研究与高等研究院）；Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information（量子光学与量子信息研究所）
Causality is a seminal concept in science: Any research discipline, from sociology and medicine to physics and chemistry, aims at understanding the causes that could explain the correlations observed among some measured variables. While several methods exist to characterize classical causal models, no general construction is known for the quantum case. In this work, we present quantum inflation, a systematic technique to falsify if a given quantum causal model is compatible with some observed correlations. We demonstrate the power of the technique by reproducing known results and solving open …
$\texttt{causalAssembly}$: Generating Realistic Production Data for Benchmarking Causal Discovery
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世有限公司）；University of Applied Sciences Kempten（肯普滕应用科学大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)（慕尼黑机器学习中心）
Debiasing Machine Learning Predictions for Causal Inference Without Additional Ground Truth Data: "One Map, Many Trials" in Satellite-Driven Poverty Analysis
Causal discovery, the task of automatically constructing a causal model from data, is of major significance across the sciences. Evaluating the performance of causal discovery algorithms should ideally involve comparing the inferred models to ground-truth models available for benchmark datasets, which in turn requires a notion of distance between causal models. While such distances have been proposed previously, they are limited by focusing on graphical properties of the causal models being compared. Here, we overcome this limitation by defining distances derived from the causal distributions …
We consider the problem of learning the structure of a causal directed acyclic graph (DAG) model in the presence of latent variables. We define latent factor causal models (LFCMs) as a restriction on causal DAG models with latent variables, which are composed of clusters of observed variables that share the same latent parent and connections between these clusters given by edges pointing from the observed variables to latent variables. LFCMs are motivated by gene regulatory networks, where regulatory edges, corresponding to transcription factors, connect spatially clustered genes. We show iden…
In this note we explore a fully unsupervised deep-learning framework for simulating non-linear structural equation models from observational training data. The main contribution of this note is an architecture for applying moment-matching loss functions to the edges of a causal Bayesian graph, resulting in a generative conditional-moment-matching graph-neural-network. This framework thus enables automated sampling of latent space conditional probability distributions for various graphical interventions, and is capable of generating out-of-sample interventional probabilities that are often fait…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Institute for Brain and Cognitive Science, Tsinghua University (THUIBCS)（清华大学脑与认知科学研究所）；Chinese PLA General Hospital（中国人民解放军总医院）
Causal discovery from time-series data has been a central task in machine learning. Recently, Granger causality inference is gaining momentum due to its good explainability and high compatibility with emerging deep neural networks. However, most existing methods assume structured input data and degenerate greatly when encountering data with randomly missing entries or non-uniform sampling frequencies, which hampers their applications in real scenarios. To address this issue, here we present CUTS, a neural Granger causal discovery algorithm to jointly impute unobserved data points and build cau…
A Neuroimaging Simulation Framework for Developing and Evaluating Causal AI
Biomedical Engineering Graduate Program, University of Calgary（卡莱尔大学生物医学工程研究生项目）；Department of Computing, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院计算机系）；Department of Radiology, University of Michigan（密歇根大学放射科）
In many scientific disciplines, coarse-grained causal models are used to explain and predict the dynamics of more fine-grained systems. Naturally, such models require appropriate macrovariables. Automated procedures to detect suitable variables would be useful to leverage increasingly available high-dimensional observational datasets. This work introduces a novel algorithmic approach that is inspired by a new characterisation of causal macrovariables as information bottlenecks between microstates. Its general form can be adapted to address individual needs of different scientific goals. After …
University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；G-Research
Causal inference is essential for data-driven decision making across domains such as business engagement, medical treatment and policy making. However, research on causal discovery has evolved separately from inference methods, preventing straight-forward combination of methods from both fields. In this work, we develop Deep End-to-end Causal Inference (DECI), a single flow-based non-linear additive noise model that takes in observational data and can perform both causal discovery and inference, including conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation. We provide a theoretical guarante…
Due to unmeasured confounding, it is often not possible to identify causal effects from a postulated model. Nevertheless, we can ask for partial identification, which usually boils down to finding upper and lower bounds of a causal quantity of interest derived from all solutions compatible with the encoded structural assumptions. One appealing way to derive such bounds is by casting it in terms of a constrained optimization method that searches over all causal models compatible with evidence, as introduced in the classic work of Balke and Pearl (1994) for discrete data. Although by constructio…
Latent variables often mask cause-effect relationships in observational data which provokes spurious links that may be misinterpreted as causal. This problem sparks great interest in the fields such as climate science and economics. We propose to estimate confounded causal links of time series using Sequential Causal Effect Variational Autoencoder (SCEVAE) while applying Knockoff interventions. Knockoff variables have the same distribution as the originals and preserve the correlation to other variables. This allows for counterfactuals that are more faithful to the observational distribution. …
Linear-LLM-SCM: Benchmarking LLMs for Coefficient Elicitation in Linear-Gaussian Causal Models
Data Science and its Applications, German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心数据科学与应用部门）；Dept. of Computer Science, University of Kaiserslautern–Landau (RPTU)（科隆-兰道大学计算机科学系）；Digital Health - Machine Learning Research Group, Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering（哈索·普朗纳研究所数字工程学院数字健康-机器学习研究组）；Institute of Informatics, University of Munich (LMU)（慕尼黑大学信息学院）；Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai（西奈山医学院哈索·普朗纳研究所数字健康中心）；Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Germany（慕尼黑机器学习中心）
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Zhejiang Laboratory（之江实验室）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
This paper proposes a Disentangled gEnerative cAusal Representation (DEAR) learning method under appropriate supervised information. Unlike existing disentanglement methods that enforce independence of the latent variables, we consider the general case where the underlying factors of interests can be causally related. We show that previous methods with independent priors fail to disentangle causally related factors even under supervision. Motivated by this finding, we propose a new disentangled learning method called DEAR that enables causal controllable generation and causal representation le…
Counting and Sampling from Markov Equivalent DAGs Using Clique Trees
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Modern machine learning approaches excel in static settings where a large amount of i.i.d. training data are available for a given task. In a dynamic environment, though, an intelligent agent needs to be able to transfer knowledge and re-use learned components across domains. It has been argued that this may be possible through causal models, aiming to mirror the modularity of the real world in terms of independent causal mechanisms. However, the true causal structure underlying a given set of data is generally not identifiable, so it is desirable to have means to quantify differences between …
Causal Inference with Video Features as Treatments
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University（哈佛大学肯尼迪政府学院）；Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）；University of Oklahoma（俄克拉荷马大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
CausalGaze: Unveiling Hallucinations via Counterfactual Graph Intervention in Large Language Models
College of Electronic Engineering, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学电子工程学院）；Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Situation Awareness and Evaluation（安徽省网络空间安全态势感知与评估重点实验室）；Institute of Computer Application, China Academy of Engineering Physics（中国工程物理研究院计算机应用研究所）
