Title
Triad Constraints for Learning Causal Structure of Latent Variables
Abstract
Learning causal structure from observational data has attracted much attention, and it is notoriously challenging to find the underlying structure in the presence of confounders (hidden direct common causes of two variables). In this paper, by properly leveraging the non-Gaussianity of the data, we propose to estimate the structure over latent variables with the so-called Triad constraints: we design a form of "pseudo-residual" from three variables, and show that when causal relations are linear and noise terms are non-Gaussian, the causal direction between the latent variables for the three observed variables is identifiable by checking a certain kind of independence relationship. In other words, the Triad constraints help us to locate latent confounders and determine the causal direction between them. This goes far beyond the Tetrad constraints and reveals more information about the underlying structure from non-Gaussian data. Finally, based on the Triad constraints, we develop a two-step algorithm to learn the causal structure corresponding to measurement models. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of our method.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2019
ADVANCES IN NEURAL INFORMATION PROCESSING SYSTEMS 32 (NIPS 2019)
underlying structure
Field
DocType
Volume
Causal structure,Computer science,Triad (anatomy),Latent variable,Artificial intelligence,Machine learning
Conference
32
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1049-5258
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ruichu Cai124137.07
Xie, Feng201.01
Clark Glymour346882.20
Zhifeng Hao465378.36
Kun Zhang577283.37