Causal Inference on Discrete Data via Estimating Distance Correlations

DOI10.1162/NECO_A_00820MaRDI QIDQ5380419zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Furui Liu, Lai Wan Chan

Publication date 4 June 2019

Published in Neural Computation (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.07712

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Nonparametric estimation (62G05)

Abstract: In this paper, we deal with the problem of inferring causal directions when the data is on discrete domain. By considering the distribution of the cause $P(X)$ and the conditional distribution mapping cause to effect $P(Y|X)$ as independent random variables, we propose to infer the causal direction via comparing the distance correlation between $P(X)$ and $P(Y|X)$ with the distance correlation between $P(Y)$ and $P(X|Y)$. We infer "$X$ causes $Y$" if the dependence coefficient between $P(X)$ and $P(Y|X)$ is smaller. Experiments are performed to show the performance of the proposed method.

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Cites work

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Cited in

(3)

• On inference of causality for discrete state models in a multiscale context
• Predicting Cause-Effect Relationships from Incomplete Discrete Observations
• Confounder detection in high-dimensional linear models using first moments of spectral measures

Describes a project that uses

Uses Software

• DirectLiNGAM
• TETRAD

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