arXiv:2505.07503cs.LGstat.ML2025-05ICML被引 3

用神经网络变分贝叶斯方法判断因果方向,更准更快。

Identifying Causal Direction via Variational Bayesian Compression

  • 用神经网络变分贝叶斯解释因果方向的编码长度
  • 在多个数据集上优于主流方法,提升显著
  • 兼顾模型拟合与计算效率,适合因果推断研究者

仅凭观测数据区分两个随机变量间的因果关系是科学领域中的难题。关键原理是算法马尔可夫条件:按因果方向分解联合分布时,编码长度更短。以往方法依赖简单函数或易于计算复杂度的高斯过程,牺牲了模型拟合能力。本文提出利用神经网络的变分贝叶斯学习来解释编码长度,在提升模型拟合性的同时保持编码简洁,并避免高斯过程方法的高计算开销。在合成数据和真实世界基准上的大量实验表明,该方法在多个数据集上性能优于多数现有方法,具有明显优势。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Telling apart the cause and effect between two random variables with purely observational data is a challenging problem that finds applications in various scientific disciplines. A key principle utilized in this task is the algorithmic Markov condition, which postulates that the joint distribution, when factorized according to the causal direction, yields a more succinct codelength compared to the anti-causal direction. Previous approaches approximate these codelengths by relying on simple functions or Gaussian processes (GPs) with easily evaluable complexity, compromising between model fitness and computational complexity. To address these limitations, we propose leveraging the variational Bayesian learning of neural networks as an interpretation of the codelengths. This allows the improvement of model fitness, while maintaining the succinctness of the codelengths, and the avoidance of the significant computational complexity of the GP-based approaches. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks in cause-effect identification demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, showing promising performance enhancements on several datasets in comparison to most related methods.

因果推断变分推断神经网络编码长度

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