Conditional Independent Test in the Presence of Measurement Error with Causal Structure Learning
Conditional Independent Test in the Presence of Measurement Error with Causal Structure Learning
Hongbin Zhang, Kezhou Chen, Nankai Lin, Aimin Yang, Zhifeng Hao, Zhengming Chen
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 9112-9120.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1013
Testing conditional independence is a critical task, particularly in causal discovery and learning in Bayesian networks. However, in many real-world scenarios, variables are often measured with errors, such as those introduced by insufficient measurement accuracy, complicating the testing process. This paper focuses on testing conditional independence in the linear non-Gaussian measurement error model, under the condition that measurement error noise follows a Gaussian distribution. By leveraging high-order cumulants, we derive rank constraints on the cumulant matrix and establish their role in effectively assessing conditional independence, even in the presence of measurement errors. Based on these theoretical results, we leverage the rank constraints of the cumulant matrix as a tool for conditional independence testing and incorporate it into the PC algorithm, resulting in the PC-ME algorithm — a method designed to learn causal structures from observed data while accounting for measurement errors. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches, particularly in cases other methods encounter difficulties.
Keywords:
Uncertainty in AI: UAI: Causality, structural causal models and causal inference
Machine Learning: ML: Causality
Uncertainty in AI: UAI: Bayesian networks
Uncertainty in AI: UAI: Graphical models
