<sc>Dagma-DCE</sc>: Interpretable, Non-Parametric Differentiable Causal Discovery

We introduce <sc>Dagma-DCE</sc>, an interpretable and model-agnostic scheme for differentiable causal discovery. Current non- or over-parametric methods in differentiable causal discovery use opaque proxies of &#x201C;independence&#x201D; to justify the inclusion or exclusion of...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Daniel Waxman, Kurt Butler, Petar M. Djuric
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2024-01-01
Series:IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10384714/
Description
Summary:We introduce <sc>Dagma-DCE</sc>, an interpretable and model-agnostic scheme for differentiable causal discovery. Current non- or over-parametric methods in differentiable causal discovery use opaque proxies of &#x201C;independence&#x201D; to justify the inclusion or exclusion of a causal relationship. We show theoretically and empirically that these proxies may be arbitrarily different than the actual causal strength. Juxtaposed with existing differentiable causal discovery algorithms, <sc>Dagma-DCE</sc> uses an interpretable measure of causal strength to define weighted adjacency matrices. In a number of simulated datasets, we show our method achieves state-of-the-art level performance. We additionally show that <sc>Dagma-DCE</sc> allows for principled thresholding and sparsity penalties by domain-experts. The code for our method is available open-source at <uri>https://github.com/DanWaxman/DAGMA-DCE</uri>, and can easily be adapted to arbitrary differentiable models.
ISSN:2644-1322