Causal Feature Selection With Efficient Spouses Discovery

Zhaolong Ling, Bo Li, Yiwen Zhang, Qingren Wang, Kui Yu, Xindong Wu

Abstract: Causal feature selection has recently attracted much more attention because it can improve the interpretability of predictive models. However, the existing causal feature selection framework needs to discover the PC (i.e., parents and children) of each variable in the PC of a target variable for spouses discovery, which is time-consuming on high-dimensional data. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel C ausal F eature S election framework with efficient spouses discovery, called CFS. Specifically, by exploiting the dependency change property between a variable and its non-PC, the proposed framework only discovers the PC of the variables in some children of the target variable for spouses discovery. Furthermore, based on the proposed CFS framework and existing PC discovery algorithms, we propose four new causal feature selection algorithms. Using benchmark Bayesian networks and real-world datasets, we experimentally validated the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed algorithms compared with seven state-of-the-art causal feature selection algorithms.