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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

We introduce an approach which allows detecting causal relationships between variables for which the time evolution is available. Causality is assessed by a variational scheme based on the Information Imbalance of distance ranks, a…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-05-07 Vittorio Del Tatto , Gianfranco Fortunato , Domenica Bueti , Alessandro Laio

Learning DAG structures from purely observational data remains a long-standing challenge across scientific domains. An emerging line of research leverages the score of the data distribution to initially identify a topological order of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Vy Vo , He Zhao , Trung Le , Edwin V. Bonilla , Dinh Phung

We address the problem of inferring the causal direction between a continuous variable $X$ and a discrete variable $Y$ from observational data. For the model $X \to Y$, we adopt the threshold model used in prior work. For the model $Y \to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Takashi Nicholas Maeda , Shohei Shimizu , Hidetoshi Matsui

Causal knowledge is vital for effective reasoning in science, as causal relations, unlike correlations, allow one to reason about the outcomes of interventions. Algorithms that can discover causal relations from observational data are based…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-12 Anish Dhir , Ciarán M. Lee

We study the problem of reconstructing a causal graphical model from data in the presence of latent variables. The main problem of interest is recovering the causal structure over the latent variables while allowing for general, potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Bohdan Kivva , Goutham Rajendran , Pradeep Ravikumar , Bryon Aragam

We investigate the estimation of the causal effect of a treatment variable on an outcome in the presence of a latent confounder. We first show that the causal effect is identifiable under certain conditions when data is available from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Yaroslav Kivva , Sina Akbari , Saber Salehkaleybar , Negar Kiyavash

We consider learning a causal ordering of variables in a linear non-Gaussian acyclic model called LiNGAM. Several existing methods have been shown to consistently estimate a causal ordering assuming that all the model assumptions are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-07-30 Tatsuya Tashiro , Shohei Shimizu , Aapo Hyvarinen , Takashi Washio

Determining the causal structure of a set of variables is critical for both scientific inquiry and decision-making. However, this is often challenging in practice due to limited interventional data. Given that randomized experiments are…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-02-28 Raj Agrawal , Chandler Squires , Karren Yang , Karthik Shanmugam , Caroline Uhler

This paper addresses the problem of estimating causal directed acyclic graphs in linear non-Gaussian acyclic models with latent confounders (LvLiNGAM). Existing methods assume mutually independent latent confounders or cannot properly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Ming Cai , Penggang Gao , Hisayuki Hara

We consider the problem of extracting a low-dimensional, linear latent variable structure from high-dimensional random variables. Specifically, we show that under mild conditions and when this structure manifests itself as a linear space…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-10-14 Xiongzhi Chen , John D. Storey

We investigate the problem of inferring the causal predictors of a response $Y$ from a set of $d$ explanatory variables $(X^1,\dots,X^d)$. Classical ordinary least squares regression includes all predictors that reduce the variance of $Y$.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-05-29 Niklas Pfister , Peter Bühlmann , Jonas Peters

To unbiasedly estimate a causal effect on an outcome unconfoundedness is often assumed. If there is sufficient knowledge on the underlying causal structure then existing confounder selection criteria can be used to select subsets of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-03-20 Jenny Häggström

We propose a new method of discovering causal structures, based on the detection of local, spontaneous changes in the underlying data-generating model. We analyze the classes of structures that are equivalent relative to a stream of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-14 Jin Tian , Judea Pearl

Traditional statistical approaches primarily aim to model associations between variables, but many scientific and practical questions require causal methods instead. These approaches rely on assumptions about an underlying structure, often…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-26 Sjoerd Hermes , Joost van Heerwaarden , Fred van Eeuwijk , Pariya Behrouzi

Scientific research often seeks to understand the causal structure underlying high-level variables in a system. For example, climate scientists study how phenomena, such as El Ni\~no, affect other climate processes at remote locations…

We propose a method to infer causal structures containing both discrete and continuous variables. The idea is to select causal hypotheses for which the conditional density of every variable, given its causes, becomes smooth. We define a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2009-10-30 Dominik Janzing , Xiaohai Sun , Bernhard Schoelkopf

Many structural econometric models include latent variables on whose probability distributions one may wish to place minimal restrictions. Leading examples in panel data models are individual-specific variables sometimes treated as "fixed…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-01-15 Andrew Chesher , Adam M. Rosen , Yuanqi Zhang

Latent or unobserved phenomena pose a significant difficulty in data analysis as they induce complicated and confounding dependencies among a collection of observed variables. Factor analysis is a prominent multivariate statistical modeling…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-22 Armeen Taeb , Venkat Chandrasekaran

This work considers the problem of learning the structure of multivariate linear tree models, which include a variety of directed tree graphical models with continuous, discrete, and mixed latent variables such as linear-Gaussian models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-11-09 Animashree Anandkumar , Kamalika Chaudhuri , Daniel Hsu , Sham M. Kakade , Le Song , Tong Zhang