Conditional Independent Component Analysis For Estimating Causal Structure with Latent Variables

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission19244 Authors

Keywords: Causal Discovery, Latent Structure Learning, Conditional Independent Component Analysis, Sparsity

Abstract: Identifying latent variables and their induced causal structure is fundamental in various scientific fields. Existing approaches often rely on restrictive structural assumptions (e.g., purity) and may become invalid when these assumptions are violated. We introduce Conditional Independent Component Analysis (CICA), a new tool that extracts components that are conditionally independent given latent variables. Under mild conditions, CICA can be optimized using a tractable proxy such as rank-deficiency constraints. Building on CICA, we establish an identifiability theory for linear non-Gaussian acyclic models with latent variables: solving CICA and then applying an appropriate row permutation to the sparsest CICA solution enables recovery of the causal structure. Accordingly, we propose an estimation method based on the identifiability theory and substantiate the algorithm with experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Primary Area: causal reasoning

Submission Number: 19244