Title: Identifying Partially Observed Causal Models from Heterogeneous/Nonstationary Data
Primary area: causal reasoning
Keywords: Causal Discovery, Latent Variable, Nonstationary

Abstract: Estimating causal structure in the presence of latent variables is an important yet challenging problem. Recent works have shown that distributional constraints, such as rank deficiency constraints of the covariance matrices, can be exploited to recover the underlying causal structure involving latent variables. However, real-world data often exhibit heterogeneity/nonstationarity, which pose challenges to existing methods. In this work, we develop a principled approach for identifying the structure of partially observed linear causal models from heterogenous/nonstationary data. We first formulate a class of heterogenous/nonstationary, partially observed linear causal models and prove that their distributional constraints are equivalent to those in the homogeneous case. Building on this, we propose a novel rank deficiency test that can efficiently handle heterogenous/nonstationary data, and further establish identifiability results for recovering the causal structure involving latent variables. We also provide a method to identify which variables exhibit distribution shifts, i.e., whose causal mechanisms vary across domains. Experiments on simulated and real-world data validate our theoretical findings and the effectiveness of our method.