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If $X,Y,Z$ denote sets of random variables, two different data sources may contain samples from $P_{X,Y}$ and $P_{Y,Z}$, respectively. We argue that causal inference can help inferring properties of the 'unobserved joint distributions'…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-05-18 Dominik Janzing

Discovering causal structures with latent variables from observational data is a fundamental challenge in causal discovery. Existing methods often rely on constraint-based, iterative discrete searches, limiting their scalability to large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Parjanya Prashant , Ignavier Ng , Kun Zhang , Biwei Huang

Causal representation learning aims at identifying high-level causal variables from perceptual data. Most methods assume that all latent causal variables are captured in the high-dimensional observations. We instead consider a partially…

We provide a scheme for inferring causal relations from uncontrolled statistical data based on tools from computational algebraic geometry, in particular, the computation of Groebner bases. We focus on causal structures containing just two…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-18 Ciarán M. Lee , Robert W. Spekkens

Most causal discovery procedures assume that there are no latent confounders in the system, which is often violated in real-world problems. In this paper, we consider a challenging scenario for causal structure identification, where some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Biwei Huang , Charles Jia Han Low , Feng Xie , Clark Glymour , Kun Zhang

Discovering causal relationships from observational data, particularly in the presence of latent variables, poses a challenging problem. While current local structure learning methods have proven effective and efficient when the focus lies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Feng Xie , Zheng Li , Peng Wu , Yan Zeng , Chunchen Liu , Zhi Geng

Causal representation learning seeks to recover latent factors that generate observational data through a mixing function. Needing assumptions on latent structures or relationships to achieve identifiability in general, prior works often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Kwonho Kim , Heejeong Nam , Inwoo Hwang , Sanghack Lee

The presence of latent variables can greatly complicate inferences about causal relations between measured variables from statistical data. In many cases, the presence of latent variables makes it impossible to determine for two measured…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-03-26 Peter L. Spirtes

Causal inference methods based on conditional independence construct Markov equivalent graphs, and cannot be applied to bivariate cases. The approaches based on independence of cause and mechanism state, on the contrary, that causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-04 Nataliya Sokolovska , Pierre-Henri Wuillemin

The presence of unobserved common causes and measurement error poses two major obstacles to causal structure learning, since ignoring either source of complexity can induce spurious causal relations among variables of interest. We study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Yuqin Yang , Mohamed Nafea , Negar Kiyavash , Kun Zhang , AmirEmad Ghassami

With observational data alone, causal structure learning is a challenging problem. The task becomes easier when having access to data collected from perturbations of the underlying system, even when the nature of these is unknown. Existing…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-10 Armeen Taeb , Juan L. Gamella , Christina Heinze-Deml , Peter Bühlmann

In causal models, a given mechanism is assumed to be invariant to changes of other mechanisms. While this principle has been utilized for inference in settings where the causal variables are observed, theoretical insights when the variables…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-07 Simon Bing , Jonas Wahl , Urmi Ninad , Jakob Runge

The problem of causal inference is to determine if a given probability distribution on observed variables is compatible with some causal structure. The difficult case is when the causal structure includes latent variables. We here introduce…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-07-24 Elie Wolfe , Robert W. Spekkens , Tobias Fritz

This paper establishes the existence of observable footprints that reveal the "causal dispositions" of the object categories appearing in collections of images. We achieve this goal in two steps. First, we take a learning approach to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-01 David Lopez-Paz , Robert Nishihara , Soumith Chintala , Bernhard Schölkopf , Léon Bottou

Causal representation learning aims to unveil latent high-level causal representations from observed low-level data. One of its primary tasks is to provide reliable assurance of identifying these latent causal models, known as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Yuhang Liu , Zhen Zhang , Dong Gong , Mingming Gong , Biwei Huang , Anton van den Hengel , Kun Zhang , Javen Qinfeng Shi

Discovering latent representations of the observed world has become increasingly more relevant in data analysis. Much of the effort concentrates on building latent variables which can be used in prediction problems, such as classification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2010-01-08 Ricardo Silva

Linear structural causal models (SCMs) -- in which each observed variable is generated by a subset of the other observed variables as well as a subset of the exogenous sources -- are pervasive in causal inference and casual discovery.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Yuqin Yang , Mohamed Nafea , AmirEmad Ghassami , Negar Kiyavash

This paper considers the problem of invoking auxiliary, unobservable variables to facilitate the structuring of causal tree models for a given set of continuous variables. Paralleling the treatment of bi-valued variables in [Pearl 1986], we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-04-11 Lei Xu , Judea Pearl

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

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