论文标题
因果方向的元学习
Meta Learning for Causal Direction
论文作者
论文摘要
由于许多科学领域的固有限制,导致对照随机试验的无法访问性一直是因果推论的基本问题。在本文中,我们着重于在有限的观察数据下将原因与双变量环境中的效果区分开。基于元学习以及因果推理的最新发展,我们引入了一种新颖的生成模型,可以区分小型数据设置的因果。使用包含每个数据集的分布信息的学到的任务变量,我们提出了一种端到端算法,该算法在测试时使用类似的培训数据集。我们在各种合成和现实世界数据上演示了我们的方法,并表明它能够在检测各种数据集大小的方向方面保持高精度。
The inaccessibility of controlled randomized trials due to inherent constraints in many fields of science has been a fundamental issue in causal inference. In this paper, we focus on distinguishing the cause from effect in the bivariate setting under limited observational data. Based on recent developments in meta learning as well as in causal inference, we introduce a novel generative model that allows distinguishing cause and effect in the small data setting. Using a learnt task variable that contains distributional information of each dataset, we propose an end-to-end algorithm that makes use of similar training datasets at test time. We demonstrate our method on various synthetic as well as real-world data and show that it is able to maintain high accuracy in detecting directions across varying dataset sizes.