Identifying Causal Mechanism Shifts Under Additive Models with Arbitrary Noise
Identifying Causal Mechanism Shifts Under Additive Models with Arbitrary Noise
Yewei Xia, Xueliang Cui, Hao Zhang, Yixin Ren, Feng Xie, Jihong Guan, Ruxin Wang, Shuigeng Zhou
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4706-4714.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/524
In many real-world scenarios, the goal is to identify variables whose causal mechanisms change across related datasets. For example, detecting abnormal root nodes in manufacturing, and identifying key genes that influence cancer by analyzing differences in gene regulatory mechanisms between healthy individuals and cancer patients. This can be done by recovering the causal structure for each dataset independently and then comparing them to identify differences, but the performance is often suboptimal. Typically, existing methods directly identify causal mechanism shifts based on linear additive noise models (ANMs) or by imposing restrictive assumptions on the noise distribution. In this paper, we introduce CMSI, a novel and more general algorithm based on nonlinear ANMs that identifies variables with shifting causal mechanisms under arbitrary noise distributions. Evaluated on various synthetic datasets, CMSI consistently outperforms existing baselines in terms of F1 score. Additionally, we demonstrate CMSI's applicability on gene expression datasets of ovarian cancer patients at different disease stages.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Causality
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Learning and reasoning
