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1. Triad Constraints for Learning Causal Structure of Latent Variables

   Ruichu Cai, Feng Xie ( December 2019 , Advances in neural information processing systems)

   Learning causal structure from observational data has attracted much attention,and it is notoriously challenging to find the underlying structure in the presenceof confounders (hidden direct common causes of two variables). In this paper,by properly leveraging the non-Gaussianity of the data, we propose to estimatethe structure over latent variables with the so-called Triad constraints: we design a form of "pseudo-residual" from three variables, and show that when causal relations are linear and noise terms are non-Gaussian, the causal direction between the latent variables for the three observed variables is identifiable by checking a certain kind of independence relationship. In other words, the Triad constraints help us to locate latent confounders and determine the causal direction between them. This goes far beyond the Tetrad constraints and reveals more information about the underlying structure from non-Gaussian data. Finally, based on the Triad constraints, we develop a two-step algorithm to learn the causal structure corresponding to measurement models. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of our method. 

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2. High-dimensional causal discovery under non-Gaussianity

   https://doi.org/10.1093/biomet/asz055  

   Wang, Y Samuel ; Drton, Mathias ( October 2019 , Biometrika)

   Summary We consider graphical models based on a recursive system of linear structural equations. This implies that there is an ordering, $\sigma$, of the variables such that each observed variable $Y_v$ is a linear function of a variable-specific error term and the other observed variables $Y_u$ with $\sigma(u) < \sigma (v)$. The causal relationships, i.e., which other variables the linear functions depend on, can be described using a directed graph. It has previously been shown that when the variable-specific error terms are non-Gaussian, the exact causal graph, as opposed to a Markov equivalence class, can be consistently estimated from observational data. We propose an algorithm that yields consistent estimates of the graph also in high-dimensional settings in which the number of variables may grow at a faster rate than the number of observations, but in which the underlying causal structure features suitable sparsity; specifically, the maximum in-degree of the graph is controlled. Our theoretical analysis is couched in the setting of log-concave error distributions. 

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3. Condition number bounds for causal inference

   Gordon, S. L. ; Kumar, V. M. ; Schulman, L. J. ; Srivastava, P. ( January 2021 , Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)

   An important achievement in the field of causal inference was a complete characterization of when a causal effect, in a system modeled by a causal graph, can be determined uniquely from purely observational data. The identification algorithms resulting from this work produce exact symbolic expressions for causal effects, in terms of the observational probabilities. More recent work has looked at the numerical properties of these expressions, in particular using the classical notion of the condition number. In its classical interpretation, the condition number quantifies the sensitivity of the output values of the expressions to small numerical perturbations in the input observational probabilities. In the context of causal identification, the condition number has also been shown to be related to the effect of certain kinds of uncertainties in the structure of the causal graphical model. In this paper, we first give an upper bound on the condition number for the interesting case of causal graphical models with small “confounded components”. We then develop a tight characterization of the condition number of any given causal identification problem. Finally, we use our tight characterization to give a specific example where the condition number can be much lower than that obtained via generic bounds on the condition number, and to show that even “equivalent” expressions for causal identification can behave very differently with respect to their numerical stability properties. 

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4. Condition number bounds for causal inference

   Gordon, S.L. ; Kumar, V. M. ; Schulman, L. J. ; Srivastava, P. ( January 2021 , Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)

   de Campos, C. ; Maathuis, M. H. (Ed.)

   An important achievement in the field of causal inference was a complete characterization of when a causal effect, in a system modeled by a causal graph, can be determined uniquely from purely observational data. The identification algorithms resulting from this work produce exact symbolic expressions for causal effects, in terms of the observational probabilities. More recent work has looked at the numerical properties of these expressions, in particular using the classical notion of the condition number. In its classical interpretation, the condition number quantifies the sensitivity of the output values of the expressions to small numerical perturbations in the input observational probabilities. In the context of causal identification, the condition number has also been shown to be related to the effect of certain kinds of uncertainties in the structure of the causal graphical model. In this paper, we first give an upper bound on the condition number for the interesting case of causal graphical models with small “confounded components”. We then develop a tight characterization of the condition number of any given causal identification problem. Finally, we use our tight characterization to give a specific example where the condition number can be much lower than that obtained via generic bounds on the condition number, and to show that even “equivalent” expressions for causal identification can behave very differently with respect to their numerical stability properties. 

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5. Identification of Linear Non-{G}aussian Latent Hierarchical Structure

   Xie, Feng ; Huang, Biwei ; Chen, Zhengming ; He, Yangbo ; Geng, Zhi ; Zhang, Kun ( July 2022 , Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)

   Chaudhuri, Kamalika ; Jegelka, Stefanie ; Song, Le ; Szepesvari, Csaba ; Niu, Gang ; Sabato, Sivan (Ed.)

   Traditional causal discovery methods mainly focus on estimating causal relations among measured variables, but in many real-world problems, such as questionnaire-based psychometric studies, measured variables are generated by latent variables that are causally related. Accordingly, this paper investigates the problem of discovering the hidden causal variables and estimating the causal structure, including both the causal relations among latent variables and those between latent and measured variables. We relax the frequently-used measurement assumption and allow the children of latent variables to be latent as well, and hence deal with a specific type of latent hierarchical causal structure. In particular, we define a minimal latent hierarchical structure and show that for linear non-Gaussian models with the minimal latent hierarchical structure, the whole structure is identifiable from only the measured variables. Moreover, we develop a principled method to identify the structure by testing for Generalized Independent Noise (GIN) conditions in specific ways. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. 

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