arXiv Machine Learning

Provable Guarantees and Efficient Learning of Structural Equation Models with Latent Confounders

arXiv:2609. 18535v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery aims to recover causal relationships from observed data.

arXiv AI
Oct 1

Differentiable Structure Learning for Cyclic Linear Gaussian Models with Latent Confounders

The paper introduces a method for learning causal structures in linear Gaussian models that may contain directed cycles and an unknown number of latent confounders, bounded by a maximum. It derives the covariance of observed variables, defines marginal quasi-equivalence to identify when different models produce the same observational distributions, and formulates structure learning as a minimization of Gaussian negative log-likelihood with a complexity penalty counting edges and latent variables. Using Bernoulli gates to parameterize edge and latent inclusion, the authors obtain a closed‑form differentiable objective whose expected value shares the same global optimum as the discrete problem, and demonstrate experimentally that this approach yields lower recovery error than prior methods.

By Sadegh Khorasani, Ali Najar, Saber Salehkaleybar, Negar Kiyavash
arXiv Statistics ML
Oct 9

Concomitant DAG Learning: On the Roles of Noise Adaptivity, Sparsity, and Non-negativity

The article discusses recent advances in learning directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from observational data, highlighting the challenges of enforcing acyclicity and dealing with latent confounding or heterogeneous noise. It reviews the evolution from combinatorial search methods to continuous, score‑based approaches that use smooth acyclicity constraints, and introduces concomitant DAG estimation techniques that jointly infer sparse causal structure and exogenous noise levels to improve robustness under heteroscedasticity and distribution shifts. The tutorial also outlines future research directions such as online, nonlinear, and neural causal discovery.

By Gonzalo Mateos, Samuel Rey, Hamed Ajorlou, Mariano Tepper