Causal Discovery of Linear Non-Gaussian Causal Models with Unobserved Confounding
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We consider linear non-Gaussian structural equation models that involve latent confounding. In this setting, the causal structure is identifiable, but, in general, it is not possible to identify the specific causal effects. Instead, a finite number of different causal effects result in the same observational distribution. Most existing algorithms for identifying these causal effects use overcomplete independent component analysis (ICA), which often suffers from convergence to local optima. Furthermore, the number of latent variables must be known a priori. To address these issues, we propose an algorithm that operates recursively rather than using overcomplete ICA. The algorithm first infers a source, estimates the effect of the source and its latent parents on their descendants, and then eliminates their influence from the data. For both source identification and effect size estimation, we use rank conditions on matrices formed from higher-order cumulants. We prove asymptotic correctness under the mild assumption that locally, the number of latent variables never exceeds the number of observed variables. Simulation studies demonstrate that our method achieves comparable performance to overcomplete ICA even though it does not know the number of latents in advance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.075 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".