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Mining genuine mechanisms underlying the complex data generation process in real-world systems is a fundamental step in promoting interpretability of, and thus trust in, data-driven models. Therefore, we propose a variation-based cause…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Mohamed Amine ben Salem , Karim Said Barsim , Bin Yang

Distinguishing causal connections from correlations is important in many scenarios. However, the presence of unobserved variables, such as the latent confounder, can introduce bias in conditional independence testing commonly employed in…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-05-03 Mingzhou Liu , Xinwei Sun , Yu Qiao , Yizhou Wang

Determining conditional independence (CI) relationships between random variables is a fundamental yet challenging task in machine learning and statistics, especially in high-dimensional settings. Existing generative model-based CI testing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Yixin Ren , Chenghou Jin , Yewei Xia , Li Ke , Longtao Huang , Hui Xue , Hao Zhang , Jihong Guan , Shuigeng Zhou

Conditional independence (CI) constraints are critical for defining and evaluating fairness in machine learning, as well as for learning unconfounded or causal representations. Traditional methods for ensuring fairness either blindly learn…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Jensen Hwa , Qingyu Zhao , Aditya Lahiri , Adnan Masood , Babak Salimi , Ehsan Adeli

Conditional independence is a fundamental concept in many areas of statistical research, including, for example, sufficient dimension reduction, causal inference, and statistical graphical models. In many modern applications, data arise in…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-17 Yin Tang , Bing Li

Many questions in science center around the fundamental problem of understanding causal relationships. However, most constraint-based causal discovery algorithms, including the well-celebrated PC algorithm, often incur an exponential number…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Kirankumar Shiragur , Jiaqi Zhang , Caroline Uhler

We consider the problem of discovering causal relations from independence constraints selection bias in addition to confounding is present. While the seminal FCI algorithm is sound and complete in this setup, no criterion for the causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Philip Versteeg , Cheng Zhang , Joris M. Mooij

Constraint-based causal discovery from limited data is a notoriously difficult challenge due to the many borderline independence test decisions. Several approaches to improve the reliability of the predictions by exploiting redundancy in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-27 Sara Magliacane , Tom Claassen , Joris M. Mooij

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

Many tools exist to detect dependence between random variables, a core question across a wide range of machine learning, statistical, and scientific endeavors. Although several statistical tests guarantee eventual detection of any…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-23 Nathaniel Xu , Feng Liu , Danica J. Sutherland

Causal discovery aims to recover causal structures generating the observational data. Despite its success in certain problems, in many real-world scenarios the observed variables are not the target variables of interest, but the imperfect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Haoyue Dai , Peter Spirtes , Kun Zhang

Conditional mean independence (CMI) testing is crucial for statistical tasks including model determination and variable importance evaluation. In this work, we introduce a novel population CMI measure and a bootstrap-based testing procedure…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-30 Yi Zhang , Linjun Huang , Yun Yang , Xiaofeng Shao

Detecting conditional independencies plays a key role in several statistical and machine learning tasks, especially in causal discovery algorithms. In this study, we introduce LCIT (Latent representation based Conditional Independence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-07 Bao Duong , Thin Nguyen

Testing for the conditional independence structure in data is a fundamental and critical task in statistics and machine learning, which finds natural applications in causal discovery - a highly relevant problem to many scientific…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-03 Bao Duong , Nu Hoang , Thin Nguyen

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

Current causal discovery approaches require restrictive model assumptions in the absence of interventional data to ensure structure identifiability. These assumptions often do not hold in real-world applications leading to a loss of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-25 Anish Dhir , Ruby Sedgwick , Avinash Kori , Ben Glocker , Mark van der Wilk

Many relations of scientific interest are nonlinear, and even in linear systems distributions are often non-Gaussian, for example in fMRI BOLD data. A class of search procedures for causal relations in high dimensional data relies on sample…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-01-30 Joseph D. Ramsey

One of the common obstacles for learning causal models from data is that high-order conditional independence (CI) relationships between random variables are difficult to estimate. Since CI tests with conditioning sets of low order can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Marcel Wienöbst , Maciej Liśkiewicz

Independence testing is a fundamental problem in statistical inference: given samples from a joint distribution $p$ over multiple random variables, the goal is to determine whether $p$ is a product distribution or is $\epsilon$-far from all…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-06 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Alireza Azizi , Ria Stevens

Independence and Conditional Independence (CI) are two fundamental concepts in probability and statistics, which can be applied to solve many central problems of statistical inference. There are many existing independence and CI measures…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-17 Jian Ma