Independent mechanism analysis, a new concept?Download PDF

Published: 09 Nov 2021, Last Modified: 22 Oct 2023NeurIPS 2021 PosterReaders: Everyone
Keywords: causal inference, independent causal mechanisms, nonlinear ICA, independent component analysis, identifiability, blind source separation, unsupervised representation learning
Abstract: Independent component analysis provides a principled framework for unsupervised representation learning, with solid theory on the identifiability of the latent code that generated the data, given only observations of mixtures thereof. Unfortunately, when the mixing is nonlinear, the model is provably nonidentifiable, since statistical independence alone does not sufficiently constrain the problem. Identifiability can be recovered in settings where additional, typically observed variables are included in the generative process. We investigate an alternative path and consider instead including assumptions reflecting the principle of independent causal mechanisms exploited in the field of causality. Specifically, our approach is motivated by thinking of each source as independently influencing the mixing process. This gives rise to a framework which we term independent mechanism analysis. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that our approach circumvents a number of nonidentifiability issues arising in nonlinear blind source separation.
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TL;DR: We introduce independent mechanism analysis, a novel approach to nonlinear blind source separation inspired by the concept of independent causal mechanisms.
Supplementary Material: pdf
Code: https://github.com/lgresele/independent-mechanism-analysis
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