arXiv:2501.17354math.STcs.LG2025-01被引 5

证明了寻找因果不变预测在计算上本质困难,且提出高效新方法。

Fundamental Computational Limits in Pursuing Invariant Causal Prediction and Invariance-Guided Regularization

  • 证明线性因果关系下不变预测存在性判定为NP-hard
  • 在计算高效算法下估计误差率可能任意慢
  • 新方法在额外条件下兼具计算与统计效率

从异质环境追求不变预测为纯数据驱动学习因果提供了可能,在因果发现和鲁棒迁移学习中应用广泛。然而,现有方法如ICP [Peters et al., 2016] 和 EILLS [Fan et al., 2024] 虽能实现样本高效估计,却依赖指数时间算法。本文证明:即使在线性因果关系下,判断是否存在非平凡的预测不变解这一决策问题也是NP-hard的。在P≠NP的世界中,这意味着任何计算高效的算法都可能导致估计误差率任意缓慢。这表明,在无先验假设时,追求因果性比检测相关性本质上更难。鉴于最坏情况下几乎无计算改进希望,本文提出一种在附加条件下可实现计算与统计高效估计的方法。该估计器是一种分布鲁棒估计器,其不确定集为椭圆形,对虚假方向赋予更高不确定性,通过调节不变性超参数平滑介于最预测解与因果解之间。非渐近结果与实证应用支持该结论。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Pursuing invariant prediction from heterogeneous environments opens the door to learning causality in a purely data-driven way and has several applications in causal discovery and robust transfer learning. However, existing methods such as ICP [Peters et al., 2016] and EILLS [Fan et al., 2024] that can attain sample-efficient estimation are based on exponential time algorithms. In this paper, we show that such a problem is intrinsically hard in computation: the decision problem, testing whether a non-trivial prediction-invariant solution exists across two environments, is NP-hard even for the linear causal relationship. In the world where P$\neq$NP, our results imply that the estimation error rate can be arbitrarily slow using any computationally efficient algorithm. This suggests that pursuing causality is fundamentally harder than detecting associations when no prior assumption is pre-offered. Given there is almost no hope of computational improvement under the worst case, this paper proposes a method capable of attaining both computationally and statistically efficient estimation under additional conditions. Furthermore, our estimator is a distributionally robust estimator with an ellipse-shaped uncertain set where more uncertainty is placed on spurious directions than invariant directions, resulting in a smooth interpolation between the most predictive solution and the causal solution by varying the invariance hyper-parameter. Non-asymptotic results and empirical applications support the claim.

因果推断计算复杂性不变性

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