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Poster

Hybrid Top-Down Global Causal Discovery with Local Search for Linear and Nonlinear Additive Noise Models

Sujai Hiremath · Jacqueline Maasch · Mengxiao Gao · Promit Ghosal · Kyra Gan

West Ballroom A-D #5006
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Wed 11 Dec 11 a.m. PST — 2 p.m. PST

Abstract:

Learning the unique directed acyclic graph corresponding to an unknown causal model is a challenging task. Methods based on functional causal models can identify a unique graph, but either suffer from the curse of dimensionality or impose strong parametric assumptions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel hybrid approach for global causal discovery in observational data that leverages local causal substructures. We first present a topological sorting algorithm that leverages ancestral relationships in linear structural equation models to establish a compact top-down hierarchical ordering, encoding more causal information than linear orderings produced by existing methods. We demonstrate that this approach generalizes to nonlinear settings with arbitrary noise. We then introduce a nonparametric constraint-based algorithm that prunes spurious edges by searching for local conditioning sets, achieving greater accuracy than current methods. We provide theoretical guarantees for correctness and worst-case polynomial time complexities, with empirical validation on synthetic data.

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