用元学习建模因果结构后验,支持高效采样与结构相关性建模。
A Meta-Learning Approach to Bayesian Causal Discovery
- 基于元学习构建贝叶斯后验模型,直接学习因果结构分布。
- 可生成符合边缘相关性与节点置换对称性的因果图样本。
- 适合需要不确定性估计的下游因果推断任务,如医疗或金融决策。
由于可识别性限制和有限数据的影响,发现唯一因果结构极具挑战。因此,为下游任务提供因果结构的不确定性(如贝叶斯后验)十分必要。然而,准确逼近该后验非常困难,主要源于可能的因果图数量庞大,以及因果边函数关系后验估计的复杂性。近期工作尝试将最大后验因果图估计转化为监督学习,但此类方法在完整后验估计时存在局限:无法捕捉边之间的相关性,也缺乏对节点置换的等变性。此外,这些方法难以可靠地从因果结构后验中采样。为此,我们提出一种贝叶斯元学习模型,支持从后验中采样因果结构,并显式编码上述关键性质。与现有贝叶斯因果发现方法对比表明,直接学习因果结构后验具有显著优势。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Discovering a unique causal structure is difficult due to both inherent identifiability issues, and the consequences of finite data. As such, uncertainty over causal structures, such as those obtained from a Bayesian posterior, are often necessary for downstream tasks. Finding an accurate approximation to this posterior is challenging, due to the large number of possible causal graphs, as well as the difficulty in the subproblem of finding posteriors over the functional relationships of the causal edges. Recent works have used meta-learning to view the problem of estimating the maximum a-posteriori causal graph as supervised learning. Yet, these methods are limited when estimating the full posterior as they fail to encode key properties of the posterior, such as correlation between edges and permutation equivariance with respect to nodes. Further, these methods also cannot reliably sample from the posterior over causal structures. To address these limitations, we propose a Bayesian meta learning model that allows for sampling causal structures from the posterior and encodes these key properties. We compare our meta-Bayesian causal discovery against existing Bayesian causal discovery methods, demonstrating the advantages of directly learning a posterior over causal structure.
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