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Title: Causal lifting and link prediction
Existing causal models for link prediction assume an underlying set of inherent node factors—an innate characteristic defined at the node’s birth—that governs the causal evolution of links in the graph. In some causal tasks, however, link formation ispath-dependent: the outcome of link interventions depends on existing links. Unfortunately, these existing causal methods are not designed for path-dependent link formation, as the cascading functional dependencies between links (arising frompath dependence) are either unidentifiable or require an impractical number of control variables. To overcome this, we develop the first causal model capable of dealing with path dependencies in link prediction. In this work, we introduce the concept of causal lifting, an invariance in causal models of independent interest that, on graphs, allows the identification of causal link prediction queries using limited interventional data. Further, we show how structural pairwise embeddings exhibit lower bias and correctly represent the task’s causal structure, as opposed to existing node embeddings, e.g. graph neural network node embeddings and matrix factorization. Finally, we validate our theoretical findings on three scenarios for causal link prediction tasks: knowledge base completion, covariance matrix estimation and consumer-product recommendations.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1918483 1943364 2212160
PAR ID:
10492285
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Royal Society
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
Volume:
479
Issue:
2276
ISSN:
1364-5021
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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