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Related papers: Detecting low-complexity unobserved causes

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The problem of using observed correlations to infer causal relations is relevant to a wide variety of scientific disciplines. Yet given correlations between just two classical variables, it is impossible to determine whether they arose from…

Causal inference studies whether the presence of a variable influences an observed outcome. As measured by quantities such as the "average treatment effect," this paradigm is employed across numerous biological fields, from vaccine and drug…

Identifying variables responsible for changes to a biological system enables applications in drug target discovery and cell engineering. Given a pair of observational and interventional datasets, the goal is to isolate the subset of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Menghua Wu , Umesh Padia , Sean H. Murphy , Regina Barzilay , Tommi Jaakkola

Inferring causal structures from time series data is the central interest of many scientific inquiries. A major barrier to such inference is the problem of subsampling, i.e., the frequency of measurement is much lower than that of causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Mingzhou Liu , Xinwei Sun , Lingjing Hu , Yizhou Wang

Causal discovery from observational data is a fundamental task in artificial intelligence, with far-reaching implications for decision-making, predictions, and interventions. Despite significant advances, existing methods can be broadly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Jincheng Zhou , Mengbo Wang , Anqi He , Yumeng Zhou , Hessam Olya , Murat Kocaoglu , Bruno Ribeiro

In a bivariate setting, we consider the problem of detecting a sparse contamination or mixture component, where the effect manifests itself as a positive dependence between the variables, which are otherwise independent in the main…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-01-13 Ery Arias-Castro , Rong Huang , Nicolas Verzelen

One of the goals of probabilistic inference is to decide whether an empirically observed distribution is compatible with a candidate Bayesian network. However, Bayesian networks with hidden variables give rise to highly non-trivial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-10-14 R. Chaves , L. Luft , T. O. Maciel , D. Gross , D. Janzing , B. Schölkopf

This paper introduces a new framework for recovering causal graphs from observational data, leveraging the observation that the distribution of an effect, conditioned on its causes, remains invariant to changes in the prior distribution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Nang Hung Nguyen , Phi Le Nguyen , Thao Nguyen Truong , Trong Nghia Hoang , Masashi Sugiyama

In this work, we propose an approach for assessing sensitivity to unobserved confounding in studies with multiple outcomes. We demonstrate how prior knowledge unique to the multi-outcome setting can be leveraged to strengthen causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-26 Jiajing Zheng , Jiaxi Wu , Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks

Not every causal relation between variables is equal, and this can be leveraged for the task of causal discovery. Recent research shows that pairs of variables with particular type assignments induce a preference on the causal direction of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Florian Peter Busch , Moritz Willig , Florian Guldan , Kristian Kersting , Devendra Singh Dhami

Discovering causal structures with latent variables from observational data is a fundamental challenge in causal discovery. Existing methods often rely on constraint-based, iterative discrete searches, limiting their scalability to large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Parjanya Prashant , Ignavier Ng , Kun Zhang , Biwei Huang

This paper considers the problem of learning, from samples, the dependency structure of a system of linear stochastic differential equations, when some of the variables are latent. In particular, we observe the time evolution of some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-05-02 Ali Jalali , Sujay Sanghavi

The machine learning community has recently devoted much attention to the problem of inferring causal relationships from statistical data. Most of this work has focused on uncovering connections among scalar random variables. We generalize…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2012-07-10 Doris Entner , Patrik O. Hoyer

The edge structure of the graph defining an undirected graphical model describes precisely the structure of dependence between the variables in the graph. In many applications, the dependence structure is unknown and it is desirable to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-01 Marina Vinyes , Guillaume Obozinski

Building on the theory of causal discovery from observational data, we study interactions between multiple (sets of) random variables in a linear structural equation model with non-Gaussian error terms. We give a correspondence between…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-07-21 Elina Robeva , Jean-Baptiste Seby

Unobserved confounding is a central barrier to drawing causal inferences from observational data. Several authors have recently proposed that this barrier can be overcome in the case where one attempts to infer the effects of several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-20 Alexander D'Amour

Identifying causal relations is crucial for a variety of downstream tasks. In additional to observational data, background knowledge (BK), which could be attained from human expertise or experiments, is usually introduced for uncovering…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Tian-Zuo Wang , Lue Tao , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Learning causal relationships among a set of variables, as encoded by a directed acyclic graph, from observational data is complicated by the presence of unobserved confounders. Instrumental variables (IVs) are a popular remedy for this…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-17 Jing Zou , Wei Li , Wei Lin

Temporally evolving systems are typically modeled by dynamic equations. A key challenge in accurate modeling is understanding the causal relationships between subsystems, as well as identifying the presence and influence of unobserved…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-28 András Telcs , Marcell T. Kurbucz , Antal Jakovác

Constraint-based causal discovery algorithms utilize many statistical tests for conditional independence to uncover networks of causal dependencies. These approaches to causal discovery rely on an assumed correspondence between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Bijan Mazaheri , Jiaqi Zhang , Caroline Uhler