Empirical Inference

Causality Discovery with Additive Disturbances: An Information-Theoretical Perspective

2009

Conference Paper

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We consider causally sufficient acyclic causal models in which the relationship among the variables is nonlinear while disturbances have linear effects, and show that three principles, namely, the causal Markov condition (together with the independence between each disturbance and the corresponding parents), minimum disturbance entropy, and mutual independence of the disturbances, are equivalent. This motivates new and more efficient methods for some causal discovery problems. In particular, we propose to use multichannel blind deconvolution, an extension of independent component analysis, to do Granger causality analysis with instantaneous effects. This approach gives more accurate estimates of the parameters and can easily incorporate sparsity constraints. For additive disturbance-based nonlinear causal discovery, we first make use of the conditional independence relationships to obtain the equivalence class; undetermined causal directions are then found by nonlinear regression and pairwise independence tests. This avoids the brute-force search and greatly reduces the computational load.

Author(s): Zhang, K. and Hyvärinen, A.
Book Title: Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases
Pages: 570-585
Year: 2009
Month: September
Day: 0
Editors: Buntine, W. , M. Grobelnik, D. Mladenić, J. Shawe-Taylor
Publisher: Springer

Department(s): Empirical Inference
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-04174-7_37
Event Name: European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: Part II (ECML PKDD ’09)
Event Place: Bled, Slovenia

Address: Berlin, Germany
Digital: 0
ISBN: 978-3-642-04174-7

Links: PDF
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BibTex

@inproceedings{ZhangH2009,
  title = {Causality Discovery with Additive Disturbances: An Information-Theoretical Perspective },
  author = {Zhang, K. and Hyv{\"a}rinen, A.},
  booktitle = {Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases},
  pages = {570-585},
  editors = {Buntine, W. , M. Grobelnik, D. Mladenić, J. Shawe-Taylor },
  publisher = {Springer},
  address = {Berlin, Germany},
  month = sep,
  year = {2009},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-04174-7_37},
  month_numeric = {9}
}