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Nonlinear causal discovery with additive noise models

2009

Conference Paper

ei


The discovery of causal relationships between a set of observed variables is a fundamental problem in science. For continuous-valued data linear acyclic causal models are often used because these models are well understood and there are well-known methods to fit them to data. In reality, of course, many causal relationships are more or less nonlinear, raising some doubts as to the applicability and usefulness of purely linear methods. In this contribution we show that in fact the basic linear framework can be generalized to nonlinear models with additive noise. In this extended framework, nonlinearities in the data-generating process are in fact a blessing rather than a curse, as they typically provide information on the underlying causal system and allow more aspects of the true data-generating mechanisms to be identified. In addition to theoretical results we show simulations and some simple real data experiments illustrating the identification power provided by nonlinearities.

Author(s): Hoyer, PO. and Janzing, D. and Mooij, JM. and Peters, J. and Schölkopf, B.
Book Title: Advances in neural information processing systems 21
Journal: Advances in neural information processing systems 21 : 22nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2008
Pages: 689-696
Year: 2009
Month: June
Day: 0
Editors: D Koller and D Schuurmans and Y Bengio and L Bottou
Publisher: Curran

Department(s): Empirische Inferenz
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)

Event Name: 22nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2008)
Event Place: Vancouver, BC, Canada

Address: Red Hook, NY, USA
Digital: 0
ISBN: 978-1-605-60949-2
Language: en
Organization: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
School: Biologische Kybernetik

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BibTex

@inproceedings{5406,
  title = {Nonlinear causal discovery with additive noise models},
  author = {Hoyer, PO. and Janzing, D. and Mooij, JM. and Peters, J. and Sch{\"o}lkopf, B.},
  journal = {Advances in neural information processing systems 21 : 22nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2008},
  booktitle = {Advances in neural information processing systems 21},
  pages = {689-696},
  editors = {D Koller and D Schuurmans and Y Bengio and L Bottou},
  publisher = {Curran},
  organization = {Max-Planck-Gesellschaft},
  school = {Biologische Kybernetik},
  address = {Red Hook, NY, USA},
  month = jun,
  year = {2009},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {6}
}