I-CAM-UV: Integrating Causal Graphs over Non-Identical Variable Sets Using Causal Additive Models with Unobserved Variables

Causal discovery from observational data is a fundamental tool in various fields of science. While existing approaches are typically designed for a single dataset, we often need to handle multiple datasets with non-identical variable sets in practice. One straightforward approach is to estimate a causal graph from each dataset and construct a single causal graph by overlapping. However, this approach identifies limited causal relationships because unobserved variables in each dataset can be confounders, and some variable pairs may be unobserved in any dataset. To address this issue, we leverage Causal Additive Models with Unobserved Variables (CAM-UV) that provide causal graphs having information related to unobserved variables. We show that the ground truth causal graph has structural consistency with the information of CAM-UV on each dataset. As a result, we propose an approach named I-CAM-UV to integrate CAM-UV results by enumerating all consistent causal graphs. We also provide an efficient combinatorial search algorithm and demonstrate the usefulness of I-CAM-UV against existing methods.

Sparse Additive Model Pruning for Order-Based Causal Structure Learning

Causal structure learning, also known as causal discovery, aims to estimate causal relationships between variables as a form of a causal directed acyclic graph (DAG) from observational data. One of the major frameworks is the order-based approach that first estimates a topological order of the underlying DAG and then prunes spurious edges from the fully-connected DAG induced by the estimated topological order. Previous studies often focus on the former ordering step because it can dramatically reduce the search space of DAGs. In practice, the latter pruning step is equally crucial for ensuring both computational efficiency and estimation accuracy. Most existing methods employ a pruning technique based on generalized additive models and hypothesis testing, commonly known as CAM-pruning. However, this approach can be a computational bottleneck as it requires repeatedly fitting additive models for all variables. Furthermore, it may harm estimation quality due to multiple testing. To address these issues, we introduce a new pruning method based on sparse additive models, which enables direct pruning of redundant edges without relying on hypothesis testing. We propose an efficient algorithm for learning sparse additive models by combining the randomized tree embedding technique with group-wise sparse regression. Experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrated that our method is significantly faster than existing pruning methods while maintaining comparable or superior accuracy.

Rule Mining for Correcting Classification Models

Machine learning models need to be continually updated or corrected to ensure that the prediction accuracy remains consistently high. In this study, we consider scenarios where developers should be careful to change the prediction results by the model correction, such as when the model is part of a complex system or software. In such scenarios, the developers want to control the specification of the corrections. To achieve this, the developers need to understand which subpopulations of the inputs get inaccurate predictions by the model. Therefore, we propose correction rule mining to acquire a comprehensive list of rules that describe inaccurate subpopulations and how to correct them. We also develop an efficient correction rule mining algorithm that is a combination of frequent itemset mining and a unique pruning technique for correction rules. We observed that the proposed algorithm found various rules which help to collect data insufficiently learned, directly correct model outputs, and analyze concept drift.