mraginsky + causality   11

[1203.6502] Quantifying causal influences
"Common methods of causal inference generate directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) that formalize causal relations between n variables. Given the joint distribution of all these variables, the DAG contains all information about how intervening on one variable would change the distribution of the other n-1 variables. It remains, however, a non-trivial question how to quantify the causal influence of one variable on another one.
Here we propose a measure for causal strength that refers to direct effects and measure the "strength of an arrow" or a set of arrows. It is based on a hypothetical intervention that modifies the joint distribution by cutting the corresponding edge. The causal strength is then the relative entropy distance between the old and the new distribution.
We discuss other measures of causal strength like the average causal effect, transfer entropy and information flow and describe their limitations. We argue that our measure is also more appropriate for time series than the known ones.
Finally, we discuss conceptual problems in defining the strength of indirect effects."

There is no mention of directed information, and yet their measure of causal strength seems to be closely related to it.
papers  to-read  causality  information-theory  feedback-information-theory 
9 weeks ago by mraginsky
[0911.0280] Causal Inference on Discrete Data using Additive Noise Models
Inferring the causal structure of a set of random variables from a finite sample of the joint distribution is an important problem in science. Recently, methods using additive noise models have been suggested to approach the case of continuous variables. In many situations, however, the variables of interest are discrete or even have only finitely many states. In this work we extend the notion of additive noise models to these cases. We prove that whenever the joint distribution $prob^{(X,Y)}$ admits such a model in one direction, e.g. $Y=f(X)+N, N independent X$, it does not admit the reversed model $X=g(Y)+tilde N, tilde N independent Y$ as long as the model is chosen in a generic way. Based on these deliberations we propose an efficient new algorithm that is able to distinguish between cause and effect for a finite sample of discrete variables. In an extensive experimental study we show that this algorithm works both on synthetic and real data sets.
papers  to-read  machine-learning  causality 
march 2012 by mraginsky
[1110.5429] Causal modeling and inference for electricity markets
How does dynamic price information flow among Northern European electricity spot prices and prices of major electricity generation fuel sources? We use time series models combined with new advances in causal inference to answer these questions. Applying our methods to weekly Nordic and German electricity prices, and oil, gas and coal prices, with German wind power and Nordic water reservoir levels as exogenous variables, we estimate a causal model for the price dynamics, both for contemporaneous and lagged relationships. In contemporaneous time, Nordic and German electricity prices are interlinked through gas prices. In the long run, electricity prices and British gas prices adjust themselves to establish the equlibrium price level, since oil, coal, continental gas and EUR/USD are found to be weakly exogenous.
papers  to-read  causality  economics  markets 
october 2011 by mraginsky
[1008.4805] Space-time and special relativity from causal networks
"We show how the Minkowskian space-time emerges from a topologically homogeneous causal network, presenting a simple analytical derivation of the Lorentz transformations, with metric as pure event-counting. The derivation holds generally for d=1 space dimension, however, it can be extended to d>1 for special causal networks."
papers  to-read  special-relativity  physics  causality 
january 2011 by mraginsky
[0910.5561] Distinguishing Cause and Effect via Second Order Exponential Models (Dominik Janzing, Xiaohai Sun, Bernhard Schoelkopf)
We propose a method to infer causal structures containing both discrete and continuous variables. The idea is to select causal hypotheses for which the conditional density of every variable, given its causes, becomes smooth. We define a family of smooth densities and conditional densities by second order exponential models, i.e., by maximizing conditional entropy subject to first and second statistical moments. If some of the variables take only values in proper subsets of R^n, these conditionals can induce different families of joint distributions even for Markov-equivalent graphs.
papers  to-read  statistics  causality  graphical-models 
november 2009 by mraginsky

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