UPREVE: An End-to-End Causal Discovery Benchmarking System

Discovering causal relationships in complex socio-behavioral systems is challenging but essential for informed decision-making. We present Upload, PREprocess, Visualize, and Evaluate (UPREVE), a user-friendly web-based graphical user interface (GUI) designed to simplify the process of causal discovery. UPREVE allows users to run multiple algorithms simultaneously, visualize causal relationships, and evaluate the accuracy of learned causal graphs. With its accessible interface and customizable features, UPREVE empowers researchers and practitioners in social computing and behavioral-cultural modeling (among others) to explore and understand causal relationships effectively. Our proposed solution aims to make causal discovery more accessible and user-friendly, enabling users to gain valuable insights for better decision-making.

Class-Specific Attention (CSA) for Time-Series Classification

Most neural network-based classifiers extract features using several hidden layers and make predictions at the output layer by utilizing these extracted features. We observe that not all features are equally pronounced in all classes; we call such features class-specific features. Existing models do not fully utilize the class-specific differences in features as they feed all extracted features from the hidden layers equally to the output layers. Recent attention mechanisms allow giving different emphasis (or attention) to different features, but these attention models are themselves class-agnostic. In this paper, we propose a novel class-specific attention (CSA) module to capture significant class-specific features and improve the overall classification performance of time series. The CSA module is designed in a way such that it can be adopted in existing neural network (NN) based models to conduct time series classification. In the experiments, this module is plugged into five start-of-the-art neural network models for time series classification to test its effectiveness by using 40 different real datasets. Extensive experiments show that an NN model embedded with the CSA module can improve the base model in most cases and the accuracy improvement can be up to 42%. Our statistical analysis show that the performance of an NN model embedding the CSA module is better than the base NN model on 67% of MTS and 80% of UTS test cases and is significantly better on 11% of MTS and 13% of UTS test cases.

Evaluation Methods and Measures for Causal Learning Algorithms

The convenient access to copious multi-faceted data has encouraged machine learning researchers to reconsider correlation-based learning and embrace the opportunity of causality-based learning, i.e., causal machine learning (causal learning). Recent years have therefore witnessed great effort in developing causal learning algorithms aiming to help AI achieve human-level intelligence. Due to the lack-of ground-truth data, one of the biggest challenges in current causal learning research is algorithm evaluations. This largely impedes the cross-pollination of AI and causal inference, and hinders the two fields to benefit from the advances of the other. To bridge from conventional causal inference (i.e., based on statistical methods) to causal learning with big data (i.e., the intersection of causal inference and machine learning), in this survey, we review commonly-used datasets, evaluation methods, and measures for causal learning using an evaluation pipeline similar to conventional machine learning. We focus on the two fundamental causal-inference tasks and causality-aware machine learning tasks. Limitations of current evaluation procedures are also discussed. We then examine popular causal inference tools/packages and conclude with primary challenges and opportunities for benchmarking causal learning algorithms in the era of big data. The survey seeks to bring to the forefront the urgency of developing publicly available benchmarks and consensus-building standards for causal learning evaluation with observational data. In doing so, we hope to broaden the discussions and facilitate collaboration to advance the innovation and application of causal learning.