用因果加权混合模型消除多重未知混杂,让机器学习真正学因果关系。
Mechanism Learning: reverse causal inference in the presence of multiple unknown confounding through causally weighted Gaussian mixture models
- 通过因果加权高斯混合模型分离混杂因素,实现反向因果推断。
- 在真实、合成数据上验证,模型预测偏差显著降低,结果更可靠。
- 适合高维非线性数据,尤其适用于医疗、金融等高风险决策场景。
机器学习模型常捕捉相关性而非因果关系,在高风险自动化应用中可能导致错误决策。本文提出机制学习方法,利用因果加权高斯混合模型(CW-GMMs)对观测数据去混杂,使任意下游机器学习模型被迫学习结果与原因之间的因果关系(反向因果推断),即使存在多个未知未测混杂因素。效应变量可为高维,预测关系可为非线性,符合常见机器学习场景。该方法只需存在一组中介机制变量,其独立于未测量的混杂变量。我们在全合成、半合成及真实世界数据集上测试,结果表明:使用经典监督学习直接训练的模型受虚假关联严重偏倚,而本方法能发现可靠且无偏的因果预测器。论文提供在线代码实现。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
A major limitation of machine learning (ML) prediction models is that they recover associational, rather than causal, predictive relationships between variables. In high-stakes automation applications of ML this is problematic, as the model often learns spurious, non-causal associations. This paper proposes mechanism learning, a simple method which uses causally weighted Gaussian Mixture Models (CW-GMMs) to deconfound observational data such that any appropriate ML model is forced to learn predictive relationships between effects and their causes (reverse causal inference), despite the potential presence of multiple unknown and unmeasured confounding. Effect variables can be very high-dimensional, and the predictive relationship nonlinear, as is common in ML applications. This novel method is widely applicable, the only requirement is the existence of a set of mechanism variables mediating the cause (prediction target) and effect (feature data), which is independent of the (unmeasured) confounding variables. We test our method on fully synthetic, semi-synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that it can discover reliable, unbiased, causal ML predictors where by contrast, the same ML predictor trained naively using classical supervised learning on the original observational data, is heavily biased by spurious associations. We provide code to implement the results in the paper, online.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。