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Inference after model selection presents computational challenges when dealing with intractable conditional distributions. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a common method for sampling from these distributions, but its slow convergence…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-22 Sifan Liu

This paper studies the estimation of low-rank Markov chains from empirical trajectories. We propose a non-convex estimator based on rank-constrained likelihood maximization. Statistical upper bounds are provided for the Kullback-Leiber…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-20 Xudong Li , Mengdi Wang , Anru Zhang

A probabilistic expert system emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert through a directional graphical model. The first step in building such systems is to understand data generation mechanism. To this end, one may try to…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-29 Vahid Partovi Nia , Xinlin Li , Masoud Asgharian , Shoubo Hu , Zhitang Chen , Yanhui Geng

We are interested in learning causal relationships between pairs of random variables, purely from observational data. To effectively address this task, the state-of-the-art relies on strong assumptions regarding the mechanisms mapping…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-09-16 David Lopez-Paz , Krikamol Muandet , Benjamin Recht

Causal inference from observational data provides strong evidence for the best action in decision-making without performing expensive randomized trials. The effect of an action is usually not identifiable under unobserved confounding, even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Md Musfiqur Rahman , Ziwei Jiang , Hilaf Hasson , Murat Kocaoglu

Testing a hypothesized causal model against observational data is a key prerequisite for many causal inference tasks. A natural approach is to test whether the conditional independence relations (CIs) assumed in the model hold in the data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Hyunchai Jeong , Adiba Ejaz , Jin Tian , Elias Bareinboim

Causal discovery aims to extract qualitative causal knowledge in the form of causal graphs from data. Because causal ground truth is rarely known in the real world, simulated data plays a vital role in evaluating the performance of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Rebecca J. Herman , Jonas Wahl , Urmi Ninad , Jakob Runge

Probabilities of causation provide principled ways to assess causal relationships but face computational challenges due to partial identifiability and latent confounding. This paper introduces both algorithmic simplifications, significantly…

We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) in which the transition probabilities and rewards belong to an uncertainty set parametrized by a collection of random variables. The probability distributions for these random parameters are…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Murat Cubuktepe , Nils Jansen , Sebastian Junges , Joost-Pieter Katoen , Ufuk Topcu

This paper considers stochastic-constrained stochastic optimization where the stochastic constraint is to satisfy that the expectation of a random function is below a certain threshold. In particular, we study the setting where data samples…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-27 Yeongjong Kim , Dabeen Lee

Entropic causal inference is a recent framework for learning the causal graph between two variables from observational data by finding the information-theoretically simplest structural explanation of the data, i.e., the model with smallest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Spencer Compton , Kristjan Greenewald , Dmitriy Katz , Murat Kocaoglu

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for sampling probability density functions (combined with abundant computational resources) have transformed the sciences, especially in performing probabilistic inferences, or fitting models to data.…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2018-05-23 David W. Hogg , Daniel Foreman-Mackey

Estimating causal interactions in complex dynamical systems is an important problem encountered in many fields of current science. While a theoretical solution for detecting the causal interactions has been previously formulated in the…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2020-01-20 Jakub Kořenek , Jaroslav Hlinka

Kolmogorov complexity and algorithmic probability are defined only up to an additive resp. multiplicative constant, since their actual values depend on the choice of the universal reference computer. In this paper, we analyze a natural…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2010-03-29 Markus Mueller

We present an algorithm that takes a discrete random variable $X$ and a number $m$ and computes a random variable whose support (set of possible outcomes) is of size at most $m$ and whose Kolmogorov distance from $X$ is minimal. In addition…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Liat Cohen , Dror Fried , Gera Weiss

In this paper, we consider the problem of causal order discovery within the framework of monotonic Structural Causal Models (SCMs), which have gained attention for their potential to enable causal inference and causal discovery from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Ali Izadi , Martin Ester

We comment on some conceptual and and technical problems related to computational mechanics, point out some errors in several papers, and straighten out some wrong priority claims. We present explicitly the correct algorithm for…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2018-04-09 Peter Grassberger

We develop estimation for potentially high-dimensional additive structural equation models. A key component of our approach is to decouple order search among the variables from feature or edge selection in a directed acyclic graph encoding…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-12-02 Peter Bühlmann , Jonas Peters , Jan Ernest

Constraint-based methods are one of the main approaches for causal structure learning that are particularly valued as they are asymptotically guaranteed to find a structure that is Markov equivalent to the causal graph of the system. On the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-24 Ehsan Mokhtarian , Sina Akbari , AmirEmad Ghassami , Negar Kiyavash

As systems are getting more autonomous with the development of artificial intelligence, it is important to discover the causal knowledge from observational sensory inputs. By encoding a series of cause-effect relations between events,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-16 Yuhao Wang , Vlado Menkovski , Hao Wang , Xin Du , Mykola Pechenizkiy