Score-Based Causal Discovery of Latent Variable Causal Models
Authors: Ignavier Ng, Xinshuai Dong, Haoyue Dai et al.
Summary
arXiv:2605. 20396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identifying latent variables and the causal structure involving them is essential across various scientific fields.
Relevance
Read next because Score-Based Causal Discovery of Latent Variable Causal Models overlaps with clean result "Leakage rate is a usable signal for recovering trigger-shaped phrases on Gaperon-1125-1B without knowing the hidden trigger itself (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "Language-mismatch LoRA SFT on Qwen2.5-7B leaks the trained completion language into bystander directives the model was never trained on, absent under same-language SFT (LOW confidence)", experiment "Add C2 control arm (donor sees marker_B without marker_A) to disambiguate paired-marker binding from marker_B leaking alone". Matching terms: latin, under, without, test, model. Source: arxiv stat.ML (Machine Learning).
Abstract
arXiv:2605.20396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identifying latent variables and the causal structure involving them is essential across various scientific fields. While many existing works fall under the category of constraint-based methods (with e.g. conditional independence or rank deficiency tests), they may face empirical challenges such as testing-order dependency, error propagation, and choosing an appropriate significance level. These issues can potentially be mitigated by properly designed score-based methods, such as Greedy Equivalence Search (GES) (Chickering, 2002) in the specific setting without latent variables. Yet, formulating score-based methods with latent variables is highly challenging. In this work, we develop score-based methods that are capable of identifying causal structures containing causally-related latent variables with identifiability guarantees. Specifically, we show that a properly formulated scoring function can achieve score equivalence and consistency for structure learning of latent variable causal models. We further provide a characterization of the degrees of freedom for the marginal over the observed variables under multiple structural assumptions considered in the literature, and accordingly develop both exact and continuous score-based methods. This offers a unified view of several existing constraint-based methods with different structural assumptions. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.