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Distinguishing cause from effect using observations of a pair of random variables is a core problem in causal discovery. Most approaches proposed for this task, namely additive noise models (ANM), are only adequate for quantitative data. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Mário A. T. Figueiredo , Catarina A. Oliveira

Causal inference using observational data is challenging, especially in the bivariate case. Through the minimum description length principle, we link the postulate of independence between the generating mechanisms of the cause and of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-17 Natasa Tagasovska , Valérie Chavez-Demoulin , Thibault Vatter

Causal discovery methods aim to infer causal direction from observational data. Functional causal discovery approaches use structural asymmetries to identify causal directionality but rely on strong modeling assumptions and provide limited…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-14 Shreya Prakash , Fan Xia , Elena A. Erosheva

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

Exogenous heterogeneity, for example, in the form of instrumental variables can help us learn a system's underlying causal structure and predict the outcome of unseen intervention experiments. In this paper, we consider linear models in…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-21 Niklas Pfister , Jonas Peters

Given data sampled from a number of variables, one is often interested in the underlying causal relationships in the form of a directed acyclic graph. In the general case, without interventions on some of the variables it is only possible…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-12-05 Christopher Nowzohour , Peter Bühlmann

At the heart of causal structure learning from observational data lies a deceivingly simple question: given two statistically dependent random variables, which one has a causal effect on the other? This is impossible to answer using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Nikolaos Nikolaou , Konstantinos Sechidis

The two most commonly used criteria for assessing causal model discovery with artificial data are edit-distance and Kullback-Leibler divergence, measured from the true model to the learned model. Both of these metrics maximally reward the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-12 Rodney T. O'Donnell , Kevin B. Korb , Lloyd Allison

In this paper, we deal with the problem of inferring causal directions when the data is on discrete domain. By considering the distribution of the cause $P(X)$ and the conditional distribution mapping cause to effect $P(Y|X)$ as independent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-08 Furui Liu , Laiwan Chan

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

A typical problem in causal modeling is the instability of model structure learning, i.e., small changes in finite data can result in completely different optimal models. The present work introduces a novel causal modeling algorithm for…

We study the problem of closeness testing for continuous distributions and its implications for causal discovery. Specifically, we analyze the sample complexity of distinguishing whether two multidimensional continuous distributions are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Fateme Jamshidi , Sina Akbari , Negar Kiyavash

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

Not every causal relation between variables is equal, and this can be leveraged for the task of causal discovery. Recent research shows that pairs of variables with particular type assignments induce a preference on the causal direction of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Florian Peter Busch , Moritz Willig , Florian Guldan , Kristian Kersting , Devendra Singh Dhami

Bivariate causal direction identification is a fundamental and vital problem in the causal inference field. Among binary causal methods, most methods based on additive noise only use one single causal mechanism to construct a causal model.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Saixiong Liu , Yuhua Qian , Jue Li , Honghong Cheng , Feijiang Li

Bidirectional causal relationships arising from mutual interactions between variables are commonly observed within biomedical, econometrical, and social science contexts. When such relationships are further complicated by unobserved…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-27 Yafang Deng , Kang Shuai , Shanshan Luo

Given a response $Y$ and a vector $X = (X^1, \dots, X^d)$ of $d$ predictors, we investigate the problem of inferring direct causes of $Y$ among the vector $X$. Models for $Y$ that use all of its causal covariates as predictors enjoy the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-03-12 Rune Christiansen , Jonas Peters

Recovering causal structure in the presence of latent variables is an important but challenging task. While many methods have been proposed to handle it, most of them require strict and/or untestable assumptions on the causal structure. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Wei Chen , Linjun Peng , Zhiyi Huang , Haoyue Dai , Zhifeng Hao , Ruichu Cai , Kun Zhang

In some causal inference scenarios, the treatment variable is measured inaccurately, for instance in epidemiology or econometrics. Failure to correct for the effect of this measurement error can lead to biased causal effect estimates.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Antti Pöllänen , Pekka Marttinen

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