arXiv Machine Learning

Directional Evidence Guided Search-Space Reduction for Exact DAG Learning

The paper introduces DECO, a non‑parametric hybrid framework that uses directional evidence from observational data to prune the search space of parent‑set configurations before performing exact DAG optimization. By eliminating empirically unsupported parent configurations, DECO achieves an exponential reduction in the admissible configuration space while maintaining flexibility for plausible edge orientations. Experiments on benchmark Bayesian networks and synthetic DAGs show substantial search‑space reduction and competitive structure‑recovery performance, with favorable structural Hamming distances across many settings.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

CATune: Structural Constraint-Aware Bayesian Optimization for DBMS Configuration Tuning

CATune is a Bayesian optimization framework that incorporates deterministic inter‑knob ordering constraints from DBMS documentation into the search space. By performing optimization within a constraint‑consistent subspace and using a topology‑aware sampling strategy, it avoids costly post‑hoc constraint handling. Experiments on PostgreSQL and MySQL with TPC‑C and TPC‑H workloads show that CATune achieves up to 12.5× faster convergence to the baseline optimum and improves throughput by up to 63.37%.

By Fangping Lan, Qi Zhang, Eduard Dragut
arXiv Statistics ML
6d ago

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 5

Hold-Out Scoring for Efficient Gaussian DAG Learning

arXiv:2610. 02785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-dimensional Gaussian DAG learning faces a statistical-computational gap: methods with sharp sample complexity rely on computationally expensive subset search and a supplied indegree bound, whereas polynomial-time alternatives have less favorable sample complexity.

By Donguk Shin, Byeongguk Kang, Inseol Lee, Gunwoong Park
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
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