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Related papers: Measuring Latent Causal Structure

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With observational data alone, causal structure learning is a challenging problem. The task becomes easier when having access to data collected from perturbations of the underlying system, even when the nature of these is unknown. Existing…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-10 Armeen Taeb , Juan L. Gamella , Christina Heinze-Deml , Peter Bühlmann

Understanding climate dynamics requires going beyond correlations in observational data to uncover their underlying causal process. Latent drivers, such as atmospheric processes, play a critical role in temporal dynamics, while direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Minghao Fu , Biwei Huang , Zijian Li , Yujia Zheng , Ignavier Ng , Guangyi Chen , Yingyao Hu , Kun Zhang

We consider causal models with two observed variables and one latent variables, each variable being discrete, with the goal of characterizing the possible distributions on outcomes that can result from controlling one of the observed…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Kevin Shu

Learning meaningful causal representations from observations has emerged as a crucial task for facilitating machine learning applications and driving scientific discoveries in fields such as climate science, biology, and physics. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Jiaxu Ren , Yixin Wang , Biwei Huang

This paper develops the inferential theory for latent factor models estimated from large dimensional panel data with missing observations. We propose an easy-to-use all-purpose estimator for a latent factor model by applying principal…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-01-11 Ruoxuan Xiong , Markus Pelger

A key goal of unsupervised learning is to go beyond density estimation and sample generation to reveal the structure inherent within observed data. Such structure can be expressed in the pattern of interactions between explanatory latent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-11 Changmin Yu , Hugo Soulat , Neil Burgess , Maneesh Sahani

For two causal structures with the same set of visible variables, one is said to observationally dominate the other if the set of distributions over the visible variables realizable by the first contains the set of distributions over the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-24 Marina Maciel Ansanelli , Elie Wolfe , Robert W. Spekkens

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Benedikt Höltgen

Consider a set of multiple, multimodal sensors capturing a complex system or a physical phenomenon of interest. Our primary goal is to distinguish the underlying sources of variability manifested in the measured data. The first step in our…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2016-11-28 Vardan Papyan , Ronen Talmon

We propose to learn latent graphical models when data have mixed variables and missing values. This model could be used for further data analysis, including regression, classification, ranking etc. It also could be used for imputing missing…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-11-17 Xiao Li , Jinzhu Jia , Yuan Yao

Identifying latent variables and the causal structure involving them is essential across various scientific fields. While many existing works fall under the category of constraint-based methods (with e.g. conditional independence or rank…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Ignavier Ng , Xinshuai Dong , Haoyue Dai , Biwei Huang , Peter Spirtes , Kun Zhang

Latent traversal is a popular approach to visualize the disentangled latent representations. Given a bunch of variations in a single unit of the latent representation, it is expected that there is a change in a single factor of variation of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Xinqi Zhu , Chang Xu , Dacheng Tao

A new statistical technique for constructing linear latent structure (LLS) models from available data, supported by well established theoretical results and an efficient algorithm, is presented. The method reduces the problem of estimating…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-06-13 I. Akushevich , M. Kovtun , A. I. Yashin , K. G. Manton

We propose a method for inferring the existence of a latent common cause ('confounder') of two observed random variables. The method assumes that the two effects of the confounder are (possibly nonlinear) functions of the confounder plus…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2012-05-14 Dominik Janzing , Jonas Peters , Joris Mooij , Bernhard Schoelkopf

We argue that the selective inclusion of data points based on latent objectives is common in practical situations, such as music sequences. Since this selection process often distorts statistical analysis, previous work primarily views it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Yujia Zheng , Zeyu Tang , Yiwen Qiu , Bernhard Schölkopf , Kun Zhang

Latent factor models are the canonical statistical tool for exploratory analyses of low-dimensional linear structure for an observation matrix with p features across n samples. We develop a structured Bayesian group factor analysis model…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-11-12 Shiwen Zhao , Chuan Gao , Sayan Mukherjee , Barbara E Engelhardt

Causal effect estimation from observational data is a crucial but challenging task. Currently, only a limited number of data-driven causal effect estimation methods are available. These methods either provide only a bound estimation of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-11-10 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Kui Yu , Thuc Duy Lee , Jixue Liu

An acyclic causal structure can be described with directed acyclic graph (DAG), where arrows indicate the possibility of direct causation. The task of learning this structure from data is known as "causal discovery." Diverse populations or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Bijan Mazaheri , Spencer Gordon , Yuval Rabani , Leonard Schulman

Unsupervised learning aims at the discovery of hidden structure that drives the observations in the real world. It is essential for success in modern machine learning. Latent variable models are versatile in unsupervised learning and have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-13 Furong Huang

How should researchers analyze randomized experiments in which the main outcome is latent and measured in multiple ways but each measure contains some degree of error? We first identify a critical study-specific noncomparability problem in…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-01-13 Jiawei Fu , Donald P. Green