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Related papers: Detecting low-complexity unobserved causes

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We provide a scheme for inferring causal relations from uncontrolled statistical data based on tools from computational algebraic geometry, in particular, the computation of Groebner bases. We focus on causal structures containing just two…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-18 Ciarán M. Lee , Robert W. Spekkens

Entropic causal inference is a framework for inferring the causal direction between two categorical variables from observational data. The central assumption is that the amount of unobserved randomness in the system is not too large. This…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-12 Spencer Compton , Murat Kocaoglu , Kristjan Greenewald , Dmitriy Katz

Causality plays a central role in understanding interactions between variables in complex systems. These systems often exhibit state-dependent causal relationships, where both the strength and direction of causality vary with the value of…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2025-08-05 Álvaro Martínez-Sánchez , Adrián Lozano-Durán

Causal discovery in the presence of unobserved common causes from observational data only is a crucial but challenging problem. We categorize all possible causal relationships between two random variables into the following four categories…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-12 Masatoshi Kobayashi , Kohei Miyagichi , Shin Matsushima

Identifying latent variables and causal structures from observational data is essential to many real-world applications involving biological data, medical data, and unstructured data such as images and languages. However, this task can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Lingjing Kong , Biwei Huang , Feng Xie , Eric Xing , Yuejie Chi , Kun Zhang

The goal of Causal Discovery is to find automated search methods for learning causal structures from observational data. In some cases all variables of the interested causal mechanism are measured, and the task is to predict the effects one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-01-11 Shuyan Wang

We consider two variables that are related to each other by an invertible function. While it has previously been shown that the dependence structure of the noise can provide hints to determine which of the two variables is the cause, we…

We describe a method for inferring linear causal relations among multi-dimensional variables. The idea is to use an asymmetry between the distributions of cause and effect that occurs if both the covariance matrix of the cause and the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2009-09-25 Dominik Janzing , Patrik O. Hoyer , Bernhard Schoelkopf

Causal discovery aims to infer causal relationships among variables from observational data, typically represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Most existing methods assume independent and identically distributed observations, an…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-27 Alex Chen , Qing Zhou

This paper considers the problem of invoking auxiliary, unobservable variables to facilitate the structuring of causal tree models for a given set of continuous variables. Paralleling the treatment of bi-valued variables in [Pearl 1986], we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-04-11 Lei Xu , Judea Pearl

This paper concerns the assessment of the effects of actions from a combination of nonexperimental data and causal assumptions encoded in the form of a directed acyclic graph in which some variables are presumed to be unobserved. We provide…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-19 Jin Tian

The paper concerns the probabilistic evaluation of plans in the presence of unmeasured variables, each plan consisting of several concurrent or sequential actions. We establish a graphical criterion for recognizing when the effects of a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-21 Judea Pearl , James M. Robins

We propose a framework for determining whether the causal dependence of an outcome $Y$ on a covariate $X$ changes at a given time point, given confounders $\boldsymbol{Z}$. For instance, in financial markets, the effect of a market…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-08 Shakeel Gavioli-Akilagun , Kieran Wood , Francesco Quinzan

Classical causal and statistical inference methods typically assume the observed data consists of independent realizations. However, in many applications this assumption is inappropriate due to a network of dependences between units in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Rohit Bhattacharya , Daniel Malinsky , Ilya Shpitser

Causal discovery from observational data holds great promise, but existing methods rely on strong assumptions about the underlying causal structure, often requiring full observability of all relevant variables. We tackle these challenges by…

Unobserved confounding is a fundamental challenge for estimating causal effects. To address unobserved confounding, recent literature has turned to two different approaches -- proxy variables and the use of multiple treatments. The first…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-20 Aytijhya Saha , Stephen Bates , Devavrat Shah

Latent or unobserved phenomena pose a significant difficulty in data analysis as they induce complicated and confounding dependencies among a collection of observed variables. Factor analysis is a prominent multivariate statistical modeling…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-22 Armeen Taeb , Venkat Chandrasekaran

We consider the problem of inferring causal relationships between two or more passively observed variables. While the problem of such causal discovery has been extensively studied especially in the bivariate setting, the majority of current…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-04-22 Ricardo Pio Monti , Kun Zhang , Aapo Hyvarinen

We present a novel approach to constraint-based causal discovery, that takes the form of straightforward logical inference, applied to a list of simple, logical statements about causal relations that are derived directly from observed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Tom Claassen , Tom Heskes

We consider the problem of detecting and estimating the strength of association between a trait of interest and alleles or haplotypes in a small genomic region (e.g. a gene or a gene complex), when no direct information on that region is…

Applications · Statistics 2008-04-11 Rodrigo Labouriau , Poul Sørensen , Helle R. Juul-Madsen