arXiv:2602.15306stat.MLcs.LG2026-02AAAI

提出一种新型稀疏加法模型剪枝方法,提升因果结构学习效率与准确率。

Sparse Additive Model Pruning for Order-Based Causal Structure Learning

  • 基于稀疏加法模型直接剪枝冗余边,避免重复拟合与假设检验
  • 在合成与真实数据集上速度显著快于现有方法,精度相当或更优
  • 适合需要高效因果推断的科研与工业场景

因果结构学习旨在从观测数据中估计变量间的因果关系,形成有向无环图(DAG)。主流的顺序方法先估计底层DAG的拓扑顺序,再从由该顺序诱导的完全连接图中剪除虚假边。以往研究多关注排序步骤,因其能大幅缩小搜索空间。然而实际中,剪枝步骤同样关键,关乎计算效率与估计精度。现有方法多采用基于广义加法模型与假设检验的CAM剪枝,但需反复拟合加法模型,计算开销大,且多重检验可能损害估计质量。本文提出一种基于稀疏加法模型的新剪枝方法,可直接剪除冗余边,无需假设检验。通过结合随机树嵌入与组稀疏回归,设计了高效学习算法。在合成与真实数据集上的实验表明,该方法显著快于现有剪枝方法,同时保持相当或更优的准确性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Causal structure learning, also known as causal discovery, aims to estimate causal relationships between variables as a form of a causal directed acyclic graph (DAG) from observational data. One of the major frameworks is the order-based approach that first estimates a topological order of the underlying DAG and then prunes spurious edges from the fully-connected DAG induced by the estimated topological order. Previous studies often focus on the former ordering step because it can dramatically reduce the search space of DAGs. In practice, the latter pruning step is equally crucial for ensuring both computational efficiency and estimation accuracy. Most existing methods employ a pruning technique based on generalized additive models and hypothesis testing, commonly known as CAM-pruning. However, this approach can be a computational bottleneck as it requires repeatedly fitting additive models for all variables. Furthermore, it may harm estimation quality due to multiple testing. To address these issues, we introduce a new pruning method based on sparse additive models, which enables direct pruning of redundant edges without relying on hypothesis testing. We propose an efficient algorithm for learning sparse additive models by combining the randomized tree embedding technique with group-wise sparse regression. Experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrated that our method is significantly faster than existing pruning methods while maintaining comparable or superior accuracy.

因果学习稀疏模型结构学习高效算法

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