KDD2023

Discovering Dynamic Causal Space for DAG Structure Learning

Fangfu Liu, Wenchang Ma, An Zhang, Xiang Wang, Yueqi Duan, Tat-Seng Chua

5 citations

Abstract

Discovering causal structure from purely observational data (i.e., causal discovery), aiming to identify causal relationships among variables, is a fundamental task in machine learning.The recent invention of differentiable score-based DAG learners is a crucial enabler, which reframes the combinatorial optimization problem into a differentiable optimization with a DAG constraint over directed graph space. Despite their great success, these cutting-edge DAG learners incorporate DAG-ness independent score functions to evaluate the directed graph candidates, lacking in considering graph structure. As a result, measuring the data fitness alone regardless of DAG-ness inevitably leads to discovering suboptimal DAGs and model vulnerabilities.