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Latent Hierarchical Causal Structure Discovery with Rank Constraints
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
  • Biwei Huang, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Charles Low, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Feng Xie, Beijing Technology and Business University
  • Clark Glymour, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Kun Zhang, Carnegie Mellon University & Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Abstract

Most causal discovery procedures assume that there are no latent confounders in the system, which is often violated in real-world problems. In this paper, we consider a challenging scenario for causal structure identification, where some variables are latent and they form a hierarchical graph structure to generate the measured variables; the children of latent variables may still be latent and only leaf nodes are measured, and moreover, there can be multiple paths between every pair of variables (i.e., it is beyond tree structure). We propose an estimation procedure that can efficiently locate latent variables, determine their cardinalities, and identify the latent hierarchical structure, by leveraging rank deficiency constraints over the measured variables. We show that the proposed algorithm can find the correct Markov equivalence class of the whole graph asymptotically under proper restrictions on the graph structure.

Publication Date
12-1-2022
Keywords
  • Equivalence classes,
  • Trees (mathematics)
Comments

IR conditions: non-described

Available at NeurIPS Proceedings site

Citation Information
Biwei Huang, Charles Low, Feng Xie, Clark Glymour, et al.. "Latent Hierarchical Causal Structure Discovery with Rank Constraints" Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems Vol. 35 (2022) ISSN: 10495258
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/kun-zhang/31/