Boulder County
Federated Causal Discovery Across Heterogeneous Datasets under Latent Confounding
Hahn, Maximilian, Zajak, Alina, Heider, Dominik, Ribeiro, Adèle Helena
Causal discovery across multiple datasets is often constrained by data privacy regulations and cross-site heterogeneity, limiting the use of conventional methods that require a single, centralized dataset. To address these challenges, we introduce fedCI, a federated conditional independence test that rigorously handles heterogeneous datasets with non-identical sets of variables, site-specific effects, and mixed variable types, including continuous, ordinal, binary, and categorical variables. At its core, fedCI uses a federated Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares (IRLS) procedure to estimate the parameters of generalized linear models underlying likelihood-ratio tests for conditional independence. Building on this, we develop fedCI-IOD, a federated extension of the Integration of Overlapping Datasets (IOD) algorithm, that replaces its meta-analysis strategy and enables, for the fist time, federated causal discovery under latent confounding across distributed and heterogeneous datasets. By aggregating evidence federatively, fedCI-IOD not only preserves privacy but also substantially enhances statistical power, achieving performance comparable to fully pooled analyses and mitigating artifacts from low local sample sizes. Our tools are publicly available as the fedCI Python package, a privacy-preserving R implementation of IOD, and a web application for the fedCI-IOD pipeline, providing versatile, user-friendly solutions for federated conditional independence testing and causal discovery.
- Europe > Germany (0.04)
- North America > United States > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge (0.04)
- North America > United States > Colorado > Boulder County > Boulder (0.04)
- (2 more...)
- North America > United States > Colorado > Boulder County > Boulder (0.04)
- Asia > Middle East > Jordan (0.04)
- North America > United States > Colorado > Boulder County > Boulder (0.14)
- North America > United States > California > San Francisco County > San Francisco (0.14)
- North America > United States > Wisconsin > Dane County > Madison (0.04)
- (18 more...)
- North America > United States > Colorado > Boulder County > Boulder (0.04)
- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Cambridgeshire > Cambridge (0.04)
- North America > Canada > Alberta > Census Division No. 15 > Improvement District No. 9 > Banff (0.04)
- South America > Brazil > Rio de Janeiro > Rio de Janeiro (0.04)
- Oceania > Australia > New South Wales > Sydney (0.04)
- North America > United States > Colorado > Boulder County > Boulder (0.04)
- (3 more...)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Statistical Learning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Neural Networks (0.68)
- Information Technology > Software (0.67)
- North America > United States > Minnesota > Hennepin County > Minneapolis (0.14)
- Europe > Ukraine > Kyiv Oblast > Kyiv (0.05)
- Asia > Middle East > Syria (0.04)
- (18 more...)
- Government (1.00)
- Law (0.93)
- Leisure & Entertainment > Sports > Basketball (0.67)
- Law Enforcement & Public Safety (0.67)
- North America > United States > California > San Francisco County > San Francisco (0.14)
- North America > United States > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston (0.04)
- North America > United States > Hawaii > Honolulu County > Honolulu (0.04)
- (6 more...)
- North America > United States > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge (0.14)
- North America > United States > Colorado > Boulder County > Boulder (0.04)
- Europe > Germany > Brandenburg > Potsdam (0.04)
- (9 more...)
- North America > United States > Washington > King County > Seattle (0.04)
- North America > United States > Maryland > Baltimore (0.04)
- North America > United States > Colorado > Boulder County > Boulder (0.04)
- (7 more...)