Learning Cluster Causal Diagrams: An Information-Theoretic Approach

Learning Cluster Causal Diagrams: An Information-Theoretic Approach

Xueyan Niu, Xiaoyun Li, Ping Li

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4871-4877. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/675

Many real-world phenomena arise from causal relationships among a set of variables. As a powerful tool, Bayesian Network (BN) has been successful in describing high-dimensional distributions. However, the faithfulness condition, enforced in most BN learning algorithms, is violated in the settings where multiple variables synergistically affect the outcome (i.e., with polyadic dependencies). Building upon recent development in cluster causal diagrams (C-DAGs), we initiate the formal study of learning C-DAGs from observational data to relax the faithfulness condition. We propose a new scoring function, the Clustering Information Criterion (CIC), based on information-theoretic measures that represent various complex interactions among variables. The CIC score also contains a penalization of the model complexity under the minimum description length principle. We further provide a searching strategy to learn structures of high scores. Experiments on both synthetic and real data support the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Keywords:
Uncertainty in AI: Causality, Structural Causal Models and Causal Inference
Uncertainty in AI: Bayesian Networks
Uncertainty in AI: Graphical Models
Uncertainty in AI: Uncertainty Representations