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Related papers: Foundations of Structural Causal Models with Laten…

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For decades, researchers in fields, such as the natural and social sciences, have been verifying causal relationships and investigating hypotheses that are now well-established or understood as truth. These causal mechanisms are properties…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Trent Kyono , Mihaela van der Schaar

We consider the problem of learning the structure of a causal directed acyclic graph (DAG) model in the presence of latent variables. We define latent factor causal models (LFCMs) as a restriction on causal DAG models with latent variables,…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-06 Chandler Squires , Annie Yun , Eshaan Nichani , Raj Agrawal , Caroline Uhler

We study a specific type of SCM, called a Dynamic Structural Causal Model (DSCM), whose endogenous variables represent functions of time, which is possibly cyclic and allows for latent confounding. As a motivating use-case, we show that…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-07-23 Philip Boeken , Joris M. Mooij

We present two new classes of causal models of decision-making agents. Our approach is motivated by the needs of modeling the economics of computing systems. These systems are composed of subsystems and can exhibit endogenous limits on…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sebastian Benthall , Alan Lujan

Reasoning, a crucial aspect of NLP research, has not been adequately addressed by prevailing models including Large Language Model. Conversation reasoning, as a critical component of it, remains largely unexplored due to the absence of a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Hang Chen , Bingyu Liao , Jing Luo , Wenjing Zhu , Xinyu Yang

We argue that the selective inclusion of data points based on latent objectives is common in practical situations, such as music sequences. Since this selection process often distorts statistical analysis, previous work primarily views it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Yujia Zheng , Zeyu Tang , Yiwen Qiu , Bernhard Schölkopf , Kun Zhang

We introduce an approach to counterfactual inference based on merging information from multiple datasets. We consider a causal reformulation of the statistical marginal problem: given a collection of marginal structural causal models (SCMs)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-07-18 Luigi Gresele , Julius von Kügelgen , Jonas M. Kübler , Elke Kirschbaum , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dominik Janzing

The ultimate goal of most scientific studies is to understand the underlying causal mechanism between the involved variables. Structural causal models (SCMs) are widely used to represent such causal mechanisms. Given an SCM, causal queries…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-21 Beate Sick , Oliver Dürr

Large Language Models (LLMs) generate realistic synthetic data but offer no guarantee that their outputs respect the causal mechanisms governing the target domain. We introduce CausalSynth, a framework that decouples causal structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zehua Cheng , Wei Dai , Jiahao Sun , Thomas Lukasiewicz

Causal modeling has long been an attractive topic for many researchers and in recent decades there has seen a surge in theoretical development and discovery algorithms. Generally discovery algorithms can be divided into two approaches:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-06 Ridho Rahmadi , Perry Groot , Marianne Heins , Hans Knoop , Tom Heskes

This work extends causal inference with stochastic confounders. We propose a new approach to variational estimation for causal inference based on a representer theorem with a random input space. We estimate causal effects involving latent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-26 Thanh Vinh Vo , Pengfei Wei , Wicher Bergsma , Tze-Yun Leong

We propose a novel formalism for describing Structural Causal Models (SCMs) as fixed-point problems on causally ordered variables, eliminating the need for Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), and establish the weakest known conditions for their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Meyer Scetbon , Joel Jennings , Agrin Hilmkil , Cheng Zhang , Chao Ma

Causal inference, estimating causal effects from observational data, is a fundamental tool in many disciplines. Of particular importance across a variety of domains is the continuous treatment setting, where the variable of intervention has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Christopher Stith , Medha Barath , Vahid Balazadeh , Jesse C. Cresswell , Rahul G. Krishnan

Structural causal models are the basic modelling unit in Pearl's causal theory; in principle they allow us to solve counterfactuals, which are at the top rung of the ladder of causation. But they often contain latent variables that limit…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Marco Zaffalon , Alessandro Antonucci , Rafael Cabañas

Causality can be described in terms of a structural causal model (SCM) that carries information on the variables of interest and their mechanistic relations. For most processes of interest the underlying SCM will only be partially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Matej Zečević , Devendra Singh Dhami , Petar Veličković , Kristian Kersting

Graphical models can represent a multivariate distribution in a convenient and accessible form as a graph. Causal models can be viewed as a special class of graphical models that not only represent the distribution of the observed system…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-06-29 Christina Heinze-Deml , Marloes H. Maathuis , Nicolai Meinshausen

Causal discovery from observational and interventional data is challenging due to limited data and non-identifiability: factors that introduce uncertainty in estimating the underlying structural causal model (SCM). Selecting experiments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Panagiotis Tigas , Yashas Annadani , Andrew Jesson , Bernhard Schölkopf , Yarin Gal , Stefan Bauer

Causal reasoning provides a language to ask important interventional and counterfactual questions beyond purely statistical association. In medical imaging, for example, we may want to study the causal effect of genetic, environmental, or…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-08-24 Rajat Rasal , Daniel C. Castro , Nick Pawlowski , Ben Glocker

Answering counterfactual queries has important applications such as explainability, robustness, and fairness but is challenging when the causal variables are unobserved and the observations are non-linear mixtures of these latent variables,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Zeyu Zhou , Ruqi Bai , Sean Kulinski , Murat Kocaoglu , David I. Inouye

Real-life statistical samples are often plagued by selection bias, which complicates drawing conclusions about the general population. When learning causal relationships between the variables is of interest, the sample may be assumed to be…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-11-15 Angelos P. Armen , Robin J. Evans