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  4. Learning Linear Non-Gaussian Causal Models in the Presence of Latent Variables
 
research article

Learning Linear Non-Gaussian Causal Models in the Presence of Latent Variables

Salehkaleybar, Saber
•
Ghassami, AmirEmad
•
Kiyavash, Negar  
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January 1, 2020
Journal of Machine Learning Research

We consider the problem of learning causal models from observational data generated by linear non-Gaussian acyclic causal models with latent variables. Without considering the effect of latent variables, the inferred causal relationships among the observed variables are often wrong. Under faithfulness assumption, we propose a method to check whether there exists a causal path between any two observed variables. From this information, we can obtain the causal order among the observed variables. The next question is whether the causal effects can be uniquely identified as well. We show that causal effects among observed variables cannot be identified uniquely under mere assumptions of faithfulness and non-Gaussianity of exogenous noises. However, we are able to propose an efficient method that identifies the set of all possible causal effects that are compatible with the observational data. We present additional structural conditions on the causal graph under which causal effects among observed variables can be determined uniquely. Furthermore, we provide necessary and sufficient graphical conditions for unique identification of the number of variables in the system. Experiments on synthetic data and real-world data show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm for learning causal models.

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Type
research article
Web of Science ID

WOS:000520962000014

Author(s)
Salehkaleybar, Saber
Ghassami, AmirEmad
Kiyavash, Negar  
Zhang, Kun
Date Issued

2020-01-01

Publisher

Microtome Publishing

Published in
Journal of Machine Learning Research
Volume

21

Subjects

Automation & Control Systems

•

Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence

•

Computer Science

•

causal discovery

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structural equation models

•

non-gaussianity

•

latent variables

•

independent component analysis

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
BAN  
Available on Infoscience
April 5, 2020
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/167973
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