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### Graphical Models for Recovering Probabilistic and Causal Queries from Missing Data

We address the problem of deciding whether a causal or probabilistic query is estimable from data corrupted by missing entries, given a model of missingness process. We extend the results of Mohan et al, 2013 by presenting more general conditions for recovering probabilistic queries of the form P(y|x) and P(y,x) as well as causal queries of the form P(y|do(x)). We show that causal queries may be recoverable even when the factors in their identifying estimands are not recoverable. Specifically, we derive graphical conditions for recovering causal effects of the form P(y|do(x)) when Y and its missingness mechanism are not d-separable. Finally, we apply our results to problems of attrition and characterize the recovery of causal effects from data corrupted by attrition.

### Graphical Models for Inference with Missing Data

We address the problem of deciding whether there exists a consistent estimator of a given relation Q, when data are missing not at random. We employ a formal representation called `Missingness Graphs' to explicitly portray the causal mechanisms responsible for missingness and to encode dependencies between these mechanisms and the variables being measured. Using this representation, we define the notion of \textit{recoverability} which ensures that, for a given missingness-graph $G$ and a given query $Q$ an algorithm exists such that in the limit of large samples, it produces an estimate of $Q$ \textit{as if} no data were missing. We further present conditions that the graph should satisfy in order for recoverability to hold and devise algorithms to detect the presence of these conditions.

### Causal discovery in the presence of missing data

Missing data are ubiquitous in many domains such as healthcare. Depending on how they are missing, the (conditional) independence relations in the observed data may be different from those for the complete data generated by the underlying causal process and, as a consequence, simply applying existing causal discovery methods to the observed data may lead to wrong conclusions. It is then essential to extend existing causal discovery approaches to find true underlying causal structure from such incomplete data. In this paper, we aim at solving this problem for data that are missing with different mechanisms, including missing completely at random (MCAR), missing at random (MAR), and missing not at random (MNAR). With missingness mechanisms represented by missingness Graph (m-Graph), we analyze conditions under which addition correction is needed to derive conditional independence/dependence relations in the complete data. Based on our analysis, we propose missing value PC (MVPC), which combines additional corrections with traditional causal discovery algorithm, in particular, PC. Our proposed MVPC is shown in theory to give asymptotically correct results even using data that are MAR and MNAR. Experiment results illustrate that the proposed algorithm can correct the conditional independence for values MCAR, MAR and rather general cases of values MNAR both with synthetic data as well as real-life healthcare application.

### Recoverability of Joint Distribution from Missing Data

A probabilistic query may not be estimable from observed data corrupted by missing values if the data are not missing at random (MAR). It is therefore of theoretical interest and practical importance to determine in principle whether a probabilistic query is estimable from missing data or not when the data are not MAR. We present an algorithm that systematically determines whether the joint probability is estimable from observed data with missing values, assuming that the data-generation model is represented as a Bayesian network containing unobserved latent variables that not only encodes the dependencies among the variables but also explicitly portrays the mechanisms responsible for the missingness process. The result significantly advances the existing work.

### Modeling Dynamic Missingness of Implicit Feedback for Recommendation

Implicit feedback is widely used in collaborative filtering methods for recommendation. It is well known that implicit feedback contains a large number of values that are \emph{missing not at random} (MNAR); and the missing data is a mixture of negative and unknown feedback, making it difficult to learn user's negative preferences. Recent studies modeled \emph{exposure}, a latent missingness variable which indicates whether an item is missing to a user, to give each missing entry a confidence of being negative feedback. However, these studies use static models and ignore the information in temporal dependencies among items, which seems to be a essential underlying factor to subsequent missingness. To model and exploit the dynamics of missingness, we propose a latent variable named \emph{user intent}'' to govern the temporal changes of item missingness, and a hidden Markov model to represent such a process.