English
Related papers

Related papers: Measuring Latent Causal Structure

200 papers

Analytical understanding of how low-dimensional latent features reveal themselves in large-dimensional data is still lacking. We study this by defining a linear latent feature model with additive noise constructed from probabilistic…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2022-07-20 Philipp Fleig , Ilya Nemenman

Recovering causal structure in the presence of latent variables is an important but challenging task. While many methods have been proposed to handle it, most of them require strict and/or untestable assumptions on the causal structure. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Wei Chen , Linjun Peng , Zhiyi Huang , Haoyue Dai , Zhifeng Hao , Ruichu Cai , Kun Zhang

We propose an approach for learning the causal structure in stochastic dynamical systems with a $1$-step functional dependency in the presence of latent variables. We propose an information-theoretic approach that allows us to recover the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2017-01-25 Saber Salehkaleybar , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

We focus on causal discovery in the presence of measurement error in linear systems where the mixing matrix, i.e., the matrix indicating the independent exogenous noise terms pertaining to the observed variables, is identified up to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Yuqin Yang , AmirEmad Ghassami , Mohamed Nafea , Negar Kiyavash , Kun Zhang , Ilya Shpitser

Most causal discovery procedures assume that there are no latent confounders in the system, which is often violated in real-world problems. In this paper, we consider a challenging scenario for causal structure identification, where some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Biwei Huang , Charles Jia Han Low , Feng Xie , Clark Glymour , Kun Zhang

Causal discovery with latent variables is a crucial but challenging task. Despite the emergence of numerous methods aimed at addressing this challenge, they are not fully identified to the structure that two observed variables are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Wei Chen , Zhiyi Huang , Ruichu Cai , Zhifeng Hao , Kun Zhang

Most causal discovery algorithms find causal structure among a set of observed variables. Learning the causal structure among latent variables remains an important open problem, particularly when using high-dimensional data. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Jonathan D. Young , Bryan Andrews , Gregory F. Cooper , Xinghua Lu

Learning predictors that do not rely on spurious correlations involves building causal representations. However, learning such a representation is very challenging. We, therefore, formulate the problem of learning a causal representation…

We propose a method to detect model misspecifications in nonlinear causal additive and potentially heteroscedastic noise models. We aim to identify predictor variables for which we can infer the causal effect even in cases of such…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-28 Christoph Schultheiss , Peter Bühlmann

At the heart of causal structure learning from observational data lies a deceivingly simple question: given two statistically dependent random variables, which one has a causal effect on the other? This is impossible to answer using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Nikolaos Nikolaou , Konstantinos Sechidis

The task of inferring high-level causal variables from low-level observations, commonly referred to as causal representation learning, is fundamentally underconstrained. As such, recent works to address this problem focus on various…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-26 Simon Bing , Urmi Ninad , Jonas Wahl , Jakob Runge

As a popular tool for producing meaningful and interpretable models, large-scale sparse learning works efficiently when the underlying structures are indeed or close to sparse. However, naively applying the existing regularization methods…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-10-10 Zemin Zheng , Jinchi Lv , Wei Lin

Learning a causal effect from observational data is not straightforward, as this is not possible without further assumptions. If hidden common causes between treatment $X$ and outcome $Y$ cannot be blocked by other measurements, one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-11-10 Ricardo Silva , Shohei Shimizu

Observational studies are a key resource for causal inference but are often affected by systematic biases. Prior work has focused mainly on detecting these biases, via sensitivity analyses and comparisons with randomized controlled trials,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-03 Ilker Demirel , Zeshan Hussain , Piersilvio De Bartolomeis , David Sontag

Addressing selection bias in latent variable causal discovery is important yet underexplored, largely due to a lack of suitable statistical tools: While various tools beyond basic conditional independencies have been developed to handle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Haoyue Dai , Yiwen Qiu , Ignavier Ng , Xinshuai Dong , Peter Spirtes , Kun Zhang

Our goal is to recover time-delayed latent causal variables and identify their relations from measured temporal data. Estimating causally-related latent variables from observations is particularly challenging as the latent variables are not…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-10 Weiran Yao , Yuewen Sun , Alex Ho , Changyin Sun , Kun Zhang

Learning representations purely from observations concerns the problem of learning a low-dimensional, compact representation which is beneficial to prediction models. Under the hypothesis that the intrinsic latent factors follow some casual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Mengyue Yang , Xinyu Cai , Furui Liu , Weinan Zhang , Jun Wang

In data analysis, latent variables play a central role because they help provide powerful insights into a wide variety of phenomena, ranging from biological to human sciences. The latent tree model, a particular type of probabilistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-05 Raphaël Mourad , Christine Sinoquet , Nevin L. Zhang , Tengfei Liu , Philippe Leray

Learning identifiable representations and models from low-level observations is helpful for an intelligent spacecraft to complete downstream tasks reliably. For temporal observations, to ensure that the data generating process is provably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Congxi Zhang , Yongchun Xie

We consider the problem of extracting a low-dimensional, linear latent variable structure from high-dimensional random variables. Specifically, we show that under mild conditions and when this structure manifests itself as a linear space…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-10-14 Xiongzhi Chen , John D. Storey