在未观测混杂因子下,用可微方法发现非线性循环因果关系。
Differentiable Cyclic Causal Discovery Under Unmeasured Confounders
- 通过交替优化图结构与混杂因子分布,实现可微学习。
- 在合成数据和基因扰动数据上优于现有方法。
- 适用于生物网络等存在循环因果的复杂系统。
理解变量间的因果关系是科学各领域的基础。大多数因果发现算法依赖两个关键假设:(i) 所有变量均可观测,(ii) 潜在因果图无环。尽管这些假设简化了理论分析,但在真实系统(如生物网络)中常被违反。现有考虑混杂因子的方法或假设线性关系,或难以扩展。为此,我们提出 DCCD-CONF,一种基于干预数据的可微学习框架,用于在未观测混杂因子下发现非线性循环因果图。该方法通过最大化数据对数似然,交替优化图结构与混杂因子分布。在合成数据和真实世界基因扰动数据集上的实验表明,DCCD-CONF 在因果图恢复和混杂因子识别上均优于现有最先进方法。此外,我们还提供了该框架的一致性保证,强化其理论可靠性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Understanding causal relationships between variables is fundamental across scientific disciplines. Most causal discovery algorithms rely on two key assumptions: (i) all variables are observed, and (ii) the underlying causal graph is acyclic. While these assumptions simplify theoretical analysis, they are often violated in real-world systems, such as biological networks. Existing methods that account for confounders either assume linearity or struggle with scalability. To address these limitations, we propose DCCD-CONF, a novel framework for differentiable learning of nonlinear cyclic causal graphs in the presence of unmeasured confounders using interventional data. Our approach alternates between optimizing the graph structure and estimating the confounder distribution by maximizing the log-likelihood of the data. Through experiments on synthetic data and real-world gene perturbation datasets, we show that DCCD-CONF outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both causal graph recovery and confounder identification. Additionally, we also provide consistency guarantees for our framework, reinforcing its theoretical soundness.
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