Score-based Causal Discovery from Heterogeneous Data

Chenwei Ding, Biwei Huang, Mingming Gong, Kun Zhang, Tongliang Liu, Dacheng Tao

Keywords: causal discovery, heterogeneous data, structure learning

Abstract: Causal discovery has witnessed significant progress over the past decades. Most algorithms in causal discovery consider a single domain with a fixed distribution. However, it is commonplace to encounter heterogeneous data (data from different domains with distribution shifts). Applying existing methods on such heterogeneous data may lead to spurious edges or incorrect directions in the learned graph. In this paper, we develop a novel score-based approach for causal discovery from heterogeneous data. Specifically, we propose a Multiple-Domain Score Search (MDSS) algorithm, which is guaranteed to find the correct graph skeleton asymptotically. Furthermore, benefiting from distribution shifts, MDSS enables the detection of more causal directions than previous algorithms designed for single domain data. The proposed MDSS can be readily incorporated into off-the-shelf search strategies, such as the greedy search and the policy-gradient-based search. Theoretical analyses and extensive experiments on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the efficacy of our method.

One-sentence Summary: The paper proposes a novel score-based approach for discovering the structure of a causal graph in the presence of heterogeneous data

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