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We present a constraint-based algorithm for learning causal structures from observational time-series data, in the presence of latent confounders. We assume a discrete-time, stationary structural vector autoregressive process, with both…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Raanan Y. Rohekar , Shami Nisimov , Yaniv Gurwicz , Gal Novik

We consider linear structural equation models with explicitly modelled latent variables. In such models, observed and latent variables solve linear equations including stochastic noise terms. The goal of our work is to identify the direct…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-28 Tom Hochsprung , Nils Sturma , Jakob Runge , Mathias Drton , Andreas Gerhardus

Causal models with unobserved variables impose nontrivial constraints on the distributions over the observed variables. When a common cause of two variables is unobserved, it is impossible to uncover the causal relation between them without…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-12-14 Beata Zjawin , Elie Wolfe , Robert W. Spekkens

We present a very general approach to learning the structure of causal models based on d-separation constraints, obtained from any given set of overlapping passive observational or experimental data sets. The procedure allows for both…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-09-27 Antti Hyttinen , Patrik O. Hoyer , Frederick Eberhardt , Matti Jarvisalo

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

Causal representation learning seeks to recover latent factors that generate observational data through a mixing function. Needing assumptions on latent structures or relationships to achieve identifiability in general, prior works often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Kwonho Kim , Heejeong Nam , Inwoo Hwang , Sanghack Lee

Causality lays the foundation for the trajectory of our world. Causal inference (CI), which aims to infer intrinsic causal relations among variables of interest, has emerged as a crucial research topic. Nevertheless, the lack of observation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Yaochen Zhu , Yinhan He , Jing Ma , Mengxuan Hu , Sheng Li , Jundong Li

Linear causal models are important tools for modeling causal dependencies and yet in practice, only a subset of the variables can be observed. In this paper, we examine the parameter identifiability of these models by investigating whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Xinshuai Dong , Ignavier Ng , Biwei Huang , Yuewen Sun , Songyao Jin , Roberto Legaspi , Peter Spirtes , Kun Zhang

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

Prior work has shown that causal structure can be uniquely identified from observational data when these follow a structural equation model whose error terms have equal variances. We show that this fact is implied by an ordering among…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-05-25 Wenyu Chen , Mathias Drton , Y. Samuel Wang

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…

We show that there is a general, informative and reliable procedure for discovering causal relations when, for all the investigator knows, both latent variables and selection bias may be at work. Given information about conditional…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-21 Peter L. Spirtes , Christopher Meek , Thomas S. Richardson

The discovery of causal relationships is a fundamental problem in science and medicine. In recent years, many elegant approaches to discovering causal relationships between two variables from observational data have been proposed. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-22 Ciarán M. Lee , Christopher Hart , Jonathan G. Richens , Saurabh Johri

Latent variable models are used to estimate variables of interest quantities which are observable only up to some measurement error. In many studies, such variables are known but not precisely quantifiable (such as "job satisfaction" in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2012-10-19 Ricardo Silva

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

In this paper we present a comprehensive view of prominent causal discovery algorithms, categorized into two main categories (1) assuming acyclic and no latent variables, and (2) allowing both cycles and latent variables, along with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-09-13 Karamjit Singh , Garima Gupta , Vartika Tewari , Gautam Shroff

Causal effect estimation from observational data is a challenging problem, especially with high dimensional data and in the presence of unobserved variables. The available data-driven methods for tackling the problem either provide an…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-25 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jiji Zhang , Jixue Liu , Thuc Duy Le

Suppose we observe samples of a subset of a collection of random variables. No additional information is provided about the number of latent variables, nor of the relationship between the latent and observed variables. Is it possible to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-11-05 Venkat Chandrasekaran , Pablo A. Parrilo , Alan S. Willsky

The standard approach to answering an identifiable causal-effect query (e.g., $P(Y|do(X)$) when given a causal diagram and observational data is to first generate an estimand, or probabilistic expression over the observable variables, which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Anna Raichev , Alexander Ihler , Jin Tian , Rina Dechter

We describe a method that infers whether statistical dependences between two observed variables X and Y are due to a "direct" causal link or only due to a connecting causal path that contains an unobserved variable of low complexity, e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Dominik Janzing , Eleni Sgouritsa , Oliver Stegle , Jonas Peters , Bernhard Schoelkopf