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Related papers: Conditional Dependence via Shannon Capacity: Axiom…

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Certain causal models involving unmeasured variables induce no independence constraints among the observed variables but imply, nevertheless, inequality contraints on the observed distribution. This paper derives a general formula for such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-21 Judea Pearl

Regression on observational data can fail to capture a causal relationship in the presence of unobserved confounding. Confounding strength measures this mismatch, but estimating it requires itself additional assumptions. A common assumption…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-04 Luca Rendsburg , Leena Chennuru Vankadara , Debarghya Ghoshdastidar , Ulrike von Luxburg

We study the problem of deriving policies, or rules, that when enacted on a complex system, cause a desired outcome. Absent the ability to perform controlled experiments, such rules have to be inferred from past observations of the system's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Kailash Budhathoki , Mario Boley , Jilles Vreeken

We study the problem of testing \emph{conditional independence} for discrete distributions. Specifically, given samples from a discrete random variable $(X, Y, Z)$ on domain $[\ell_1]\times[\ell_2] \times [n]$, we want to distinguish, with…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-07-03 Clément L. Canonne , Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Alistair Stewart

The ultimate purpose of the statistical analysis of ordinal patterns is to characterize the distribution of the features they induce. In particular, knowing the joint distribution of the pair Entropy-Statistical Complexity for a large class…

The statistical analysis of data stemming from dynamical systems, including, but not limited to, time series, routinely relies on the estimation of information theoretical quantities, most notably Shannon entropy. To this purpose, possibly…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-09-01 Leonardo Ricci , Alessio Perinelli , Michele Castelluzzo

Shannon entropy is often a quantity of interest to linguists studying the communicative capacity of human language. However, entropy must typically be estimated from observed data because researchers do not have access to the underlying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Aryaman Arora , Clara Meister , Ryan Cotterell

Understanding how much each variable contributes to an outcome is a central question across disciplines. A causal view of explainability is favorable for its ability in uncovering underlying mechanisms and generalizing to new contexts.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-09 Weihan Zhang , Zijun Gao

The explicit link between Promise Theory and Information Theory, while perhaps obvious, is laid out explicitly here. It's shown how causally related observations of promised behaviours relate to the probabilistic formulation of causal…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-04-28 Mark Burgess

We study the problem of causal effect identification from observational distribution given the causal graph and some context-specific independence (CSI) relations. It was recently shown that this problem is NP-hard, and while a sound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Ehsan Mokhtarian , Fateme Jamshidi , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

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…

Inferring the causal structure that links n observables is usually based upon detecting statistical dependences and choosing simple graphs that make the joint measure Markovian. Here we argue why causal inference is also possible when only…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-04-24 Dominik Janzing , Bernhard Schoelkopf

In this paper, a robust non-parametric measure of statistical dependence, or correlation, between two random variables is presented. The proposed coefficient is a permutation-like statistic that quantifies how much the observed sample S_n :…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-27 Rami Mahdi

Conditional independence testing is a key problem required by many machine learning and statistics tools. In particular, it is one way of evaluating the usefulness of some features on a supervised prediction problem. We propose a novel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-08-02 Marco Henrique de Almeida Inácio , Rafael Izbicki , Rafael Bassi Stern

Computing observables from conditioned dynamics is typically computationally hard, because, although obtaining independent samples efficiently from the unconditioned dynamics is usually feasible, generally most of the samples must be…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2026-01-08 Alfredo Braunstein , Giovanni Catania , Luca Dall'Asta , Matteo Mariani , Anna Paola Muntoni

Characterising the capacity region for a network can be extremely difficult. Even with independent sources, determining the capacity region can be as hard as the open problem of characterising all information inequalities. The majority of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-07-12 Satyajit Thakor , Terence Chan , Alex Grant

In this paper, we revisit the notion of partial copula, originally introduced to test conditional independence, highlighting its capability to represent the dependence between two random variables after removing their dependence with a…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-26 Vinícius Litvinoff Justus , Felipe Fontana Vieira

The conditional mutual information I(X;Y|Z) measures the average information that X and Y contain about each other given Z. This is an important primitive in many learning problems including conditional independence testing, graphical model…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2017-10-16 Arman Rahimzamani , Sreeram Kannan

New sufficient conditions for determining in closed form the capacity region of point-to-point memoryless two-way channels (TWCs) are derived. The proposed conditions not only relax Shannon's condition which can identify only TWCs with a…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-05-08 Jian-Jia Weng , Lin Song , Fady Alajaji , Tamás Linder

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