A theoretical study of Y structures for causal discovery.pdf

A theoretical study of Y structures for causal discovery Subramani Mani? mani@ Department of EECS University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI 53211 Peter Spirtes ps7z@ Department of Philosophy Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Gregory F. Cooper gfc@ Center for Biomedical Informatics University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Abstract Causal discovery from observational data in the presence of unobserved variables is chal- lenging. Identification of so-called Y sub- structures is a sufficient condition for ascer- taining some causal relations in the large sample limit, without the assumption of no hidden common causes. An example of a Y substructure is A → C, B → C, C → D. This paper describes the first asymptotically reliable and computationally feasible score- based search for discrete Y structures that does not assume that there are no unobserved common causes. For any parameterization of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) that has scores with the property that any DAG that can represent the distribution beats any DAG that can’t, and for two DAGs that represent the distribution, if one has fewer parame- ters than the other, the one with the fewest parameter wins. In this framework there is no need to assign scores to causal structures with unobserved common causes. The paper also describes how the existence of a Y struc- ture shows the presence of an unconfounded causal relation, without assuming that there are no hidden common causes. 1 Introduction Discovering causal relationships from observational data is challenging due to the presence of observed con- founders1, particularly, hidden (latent) confounders. ?Currently at the Department of Biomedical Informat- ics, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37232-8340. 1A node W is said to be a confounder of nodes A and B if there is a directed path from W to A and a directed path from W to B that does not traverse A. If W is observed, it is said to be a measured confounder, otherwise it is a hidden c