arXiv:2608.15645cs.LG2026-08

用因果抽象统一解决因果结论迁移难题,支持无目标数据时的可靠推断。

Generalised Transportability via Causal Abstractions

论文配图:Generalised Transportability via Causal Abstractions
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 从模型层面建模源与目标间机制差异,用单一映射替代逐查询判断。
  • 即使无法完全迁移,也能给出可信的查询区间估计。
  • 适用于无目标数据或不可迁移场景,适合需要稳健推断的研究者。

将因果结论从源研究人群迁移到目标人群是因果推断的核心问题。传统可迁移性理论虽能判定单个查询是否可迁移并给出精确公式,但需逐查询处理且仅输出表达式而非具体值。该理论在查询不可迁移或缺乏目标数据时失效。为此,本文基于因果抽象理论,提出模型级视角:源与目标共享变量、图结构和干预方式,仅机制不同,使可迁移性成为同层级抽象的特例。核心思想是判断是否存在一个映射能统一源与目标的干预行为。我们在马尔可夫和半马尔可夫设定下刻画了该映射存在的条件;当存在时,所有目标查询均可同时迁移。主要贡献在于近似情形:当不存在精确映射时,最优近似映射仍能提供带证书的查询区间,将抽象误差转化为近似可迁移性的量化度量。通过在合成数据集和真实生态数据上的实验验证,所提框架的认证区间始终包含真实干预查询值。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Transporting a causal conclusion from a source study population to a target one is a fundamental problem in causal inference. The theory of transportability provides a criterion for when this is possible: given experimental data from the source and observational data from the target, it determines whether a target query is identifiable and does so completely; i.e. if the query can be transported, the criterion finds the exact formula. However, it works one query at a time and returns an expression rather than the value itself. It is also silent in two practically important regimes: when the query is not transportable and when no target data exist at all. To tackle both, we take a model-level perspective grounded in Causal Abstraction theory. Source and target share variables, graph, and interventions, differing only at a known set of mechanisms, which makes transportability a special case of same-level abstraction. Thus, instead of asking whether one query transports, we ask whether a single map aligns the source and target across their interventional behaviour. We characterise when such a map exists in both the Markovian and semi-Markovian settings; when it does, every target query transports at once. Our main contribution lies in the approximate case. When no exact map exists, the best approximate one still yields certified query intervals, recasting abstraction error as a quantitative notion of approximate transportability. We formulate model-level transport as distributionally robust optimisation over mechanism and environment perturbations of the unseen target and derive certificates for both challenging regimes: bounds for non-transportable queries, and guarantees under target-agnostic settings. We evaluate our framework on synthetic Markovian and semi-Markovian benchmarks and a real ecological dataset, and we show that the certified intervals bracket the true interventional query.

因果推断可迁移性抽象建模

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