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arXiv 2402.08328stat.MEmath.STstat.TH
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结构不确定性下因果推断的对偶似然方法

Dual Likelihood for Causal Inference under Structure Uncertainty

David Strieder, Mathias Drton

AI总结:

针对因果结构学习带来的不确定性问题,提出基于对偶似然的方法,可构建同时涵盖结构与效应数值不确定性的总因果效应置信域,在等方差线性因果模型下实现结构可识别与高效计算。

摘要:

了解潜在因果关系对于推断复杂系统中的干预效应至关重要。在一种被广泛研究的方法中,结构因果模型假设相互作用的变量之间存在含噪声的函数关系,其潜在因果结构可自然由有向图表示,图中的边代表直接因果依赖关系。在典型应用中,这种潜在因果结构必须从数据中学习,因此需将剩余的结构不确定性纳入因果推断,以得出可靠结论。近期研究中,检验反演(test inversions)为解释这种数据驱动的模型选择提供了一种思路,从而将结构学习与因果推断相结合。本文提出使用对偶似然(dual likelihood)来大幅简化相关检验问题的处理。实际上,对偶似然可得到用于构建总因果效应置信域的闭式解,该置信域能严格捕捉两类不确定性来源:因果结构,以及非零效应的数值大小。所提出的置信域可通过从汇点(sink nodes)出发的自底向上过程计算得到。为使因果结构具备可识别性,我们在误差方差相等的线性因果关系背景下展开研究。

英文摘要:

Knowledge of the underlying causal relations is essential for inferring the effect of interventions in complex systems. In a widely studied approach, structural causal models postulate noisy functional relations among interacting variables, where the underlying causal structure is then naturally represented by a directed graph whose edges indicate direct causal dependencies. In the typical application, this underlying causal structure must be learned from data, and thus, the remaining structure uncertainty needs to be incorporated into causal inference in order to draw reliable conclusions. In recent work, test inversions provide an ansatz to account for this data-driven model choice and, therefore, combine structure learning with causal inference. In this article, we propose the use of dual likelihood to greatly simplify the treatment of the involved testing problem. Indeed, dual likelihood leads to a closed-form solution for constructing confidence regions for total causal effects that rigorously capture both sources of uncertainty: causal structure and numerical size of nonzero effects. The proposed confidence regions can be computed with a bottom-up procedure starting from sink nodes. To render the causal structure identifiable, we develop our ideas in the context of linear causal relations with equal error variances.

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