arXiv Statistics ML

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

DAG-FM: A Foundation Model for Causal Discovery under Heterogeneous Causal Mechanisms

arXiv:2607. 11510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery from observational tabular data remains fundamentally challenging, primarily due to the heterogeneity of underlying causal mechanisms and the high-dimensional combinatorial search space of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs).

By Yikang Chen, Zhengkang Guan, Haoyuan Qian, Peng Cui, Yi Yang, Kun Kuang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Epidemiological Causal Graph Identification: Challenges, Identifiability and Algorithms

The paper addresses causal discovery in Directed Acyclic Graphs where nodes are either ordinal (modeled with an ordered logit) or follow a one‑parameter exponential family distribution. It proves that the direction of edges between such nodes is identifiable for generic parameter values, extending prior Ordinal‑Poisson results. The authors also propose a score‑based exhaustive search and a masked continuous optimization method using DAGMA, and demonstrate through simulations that these approaches recover orientations that are otherwise unidentifiable under classical structural equation models.

By Sambit Mishra, Yingying Wang, Christine K. Johnson, Urbashi Mitra
arXiv Machine Learning
6d ago

Score-Based Learning of Cluster DAGs from Interventions

The paper introduces COARSE, a score‑based method for learning cluster directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from interventional data. COARSE retains the two‑phase structure of prior constraint‑based approaches—first identifying clusters, then edges—but replaces the edge‑learning phase with a score‑based local search under a cluster‑level BIC score, assuming linear Gaussian relationships. The authors prove polynomial‑time complexity and consistency (given correct intervention targets) and demonstrate that COARSE achieves comparable edge recovery to state‑of‑the‑art methods while being up to two orders of magnitude faster, even on dense graphs with hundreds of nodes.

By Gaetano Tedesco (University of Amsterdam), Alex Markham (University of Copenhagen)
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Decoupled Causal Discovery

arXiv:2609.23535v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery from observational data is a fundamental yet challenging task in scientific research. While existing approaches are primarily based on...

By Zhengkang Guan, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang