We consider the problem of inferring causal relationships between two or more passively ob-served variables. While the problem of such causal discovery has been extensively studied,especially in the bivariate setting, the majority of current methods assume a linear causal relationship, and the few methods which consider non-linear relations usually make the assumption of additive noise. Here, we propose a framework through which we can perform causal discovery in the presence of general nonlinear relationships. The proposed method is based on recent progress in non-linear in-dependent component analysis (ICA) and exploits the nonstationarity of observations in order to recover the underlying sources. We show rigorously that in the case of bivariate causal discovery, such non-linear ICA can be used to infer causal direction via a series of in-dependence tests. We further propose an alternative measure for inferring causal direction based on asymptotic approximations to the likelihood ratio, as well as an extension to multivariate causal discovery. We demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed method via a series of simulation studies and conclude with an application to neuroimaging data.
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Causal Discovery with Cascade Nonlinear Additive Noise Model
Identification of causal direction between a causal-effect pair from observed data has recently attracted much attention. Various methods based on functional causal models have been proposed to solve this problem, by assuming the causal process satisfies some (structural) constraints and showing that the reverse direction violates such constraints. The nonlinear additive noise model has been demonstrated to be effective for this purpose, but the model class is not transitive--even if each direct causal relation follows this model, indirect causal influences, which result from omitted intermediate causal variables and are frequently encountered in practice, do not necessarily follow the model constraints; as a consequence, the nonlinear additive noise model may fail to correctly discover causal direction. In this work, we propose a cascade nonlinear additive noise model to represent such causal influences--each direct causal relation follows the nonlinear additive noise model but we observe only the initial cause and final effect. We further propose a method to estimate the model, including the unmeasured intermediate variables, from data, under the variational auto-encoder framework. Our theoretical results show that with our model, causal direction is identifiable under suitable technical conditions on the data generation process. Simulation results illustrate the power of the proposed method in identifying indirect causal relations across various settings, and experimental results on real data suggest that the proposed model and method greatly extend the applicability of causal discovery based on functional causal models in nonlinear cases.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1829681
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10125749
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1609 to 1615
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/223
