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Learning Identifiable Gaussian Bayesian Networks in Polynomial Time and Sample Complexity

Neural Information Processing Systems

Learning the directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure of a Bayesian network from observational data is a notoriously difficult problem for which many non-identifiability and hardness results are known. In this paper we propose a provably polynomial-time algorithm for learning sparse Gaussian Bayesian networks with equal noise variance --- a class of Bayesian networks for which the DAG structure can be uniquely identified from observational data --- under high-dimensional settings. We show that $O(k^4 \log p)$ number of samples suffices for our method to recover the true DAG structure with high probability, where $p$ is the number of variables and $k$ is the maximum Markov blanket size. We obtain our theoretical guarantees under a condition called \emph{restricted strong adjacency faithfulness} (RSAF), which is strictly weaker than strong faithfulness --- a condition that other methods based on conditional independence testing need for their success. The sample complexity of our method matches the information-theoretic limits in terms of the dependence on $p$.




Non-negative DAG Learning from Time-Series Data

Rey, Samuel, Mateos, Gonzalo

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This work aims to learn the directed acyclic graph (DAG) that captures the instantaneous dependencies underlying a multivariate time series. The observed data follow a linear structural vector autoregressive model (SVARM) with both instantaneous and time-lagged dependencies, where the instantaneous structure is modeled by a DAG to reflect potential causal relationships. While recent continuous relaxation approaches impose acyclicity through smooth constraint functions involving powers of the adjacency matrix, they lead to non-convex optimization problems that are challenging to solve. In contrast, we assume that the underlying DAG has only non-negative edge weights, and leverage this additional structure to impose acyclicity via a convex constraint. This enables us to cast the problem of non-negative DAG recovery from multivariate time-series data as a convex optimization problem in abstract form, which we solve using the method of multipliers. Crucially, the convex formulation guarantees global optimality of the solution. Finally, we assess the performance of the proposed method on synthetic time-series data, where it outperforms existing alternatives.


Learning Identifiable Gaussian Bayesian Networks in Polynomial Time and Sample Complexity

Neural Information Processing Systems

Learning the directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure of a Bayesian network from observational data is a notoriously difficult problem for which many non-identifiability and hardness results are known. In this paper we propose a provably polynomial-time algorithm for learning sparse Gaussian Bayesian networks with equal noise variance --- a class of Bayesian networks for which the DAG structure can be uniquely identified from observational data --- under high-dimensional settings. We show that $O(k^4 \log p)$ number of samples suffices for our method to recover the true DAG structure with high probability, where $p$ is the number of variables and $k$ is the maximum Markov blanket size. We obtain our theoretical guarantees under a condition called \emph{restricted strong adjacency faithfulness} (RSAF), which is strictly weaker than strong faithfulness --- a condition that other methods based on conditional independence testing need for their success. The sample complexity of our method matches the information-theoretic limits in terms of the dependence on $p$.