In plain words: It learns which variables cause which by fitting a neural network to both ordinary data and experiment data, even when it isn't told which variable was changed. It recovered graph structures strongly on standard tests, from scratch and from a partly known edge set.
Abstract
Promising results have driven a recent surge of interest in continuous optimization methods for Bayesian network structure learning from observational data. However, there are theoretical limitations on the identifiability of underlying structures obtained from observational data alone. Interventional data provides much richer information about the underlying data-generating process. However, the extension and application of methods designed for observational data to include interventions is not straightforward and remains an open problem. In this paper we provide a general framework based on continuous optimization and neural networks to create models for the combination of observational and interventional data. The proposed method is even applicable in the challenging and realistic case that the identity of the intervened upon variable is unknown. We examine the proposed method in the setting of graph recovery both de novo and from a partially-known edge set. We establish strong benchmark results on several structure learning tasks, including structure recovery of both synthetic graphs as well as standard graphs from the Bayesian Network Repository.
Nan Rosemary Ke, Olexa Bilaniuk, Anirudh Goyal, Stefan Bauer, Hugo Larochelle, Bernhard Schölkopf, Michael C. Mozer, Chris Pal, Yoshua Bengio
arXiv:1910.01075 · stat.ML, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Oct 2, 2019 · updated Aug 23, 2020
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