Gradient-Based Neural DAG Learning
Authors: Sébastien Lachapelle, Philippe Brouillard, Tristan Deleu, Simon Lacoste-Julien
Keywords: Structure Learning, Causality, Density estimation
TL;DR: We are proposing a new score-based approach to structure/causal learning leveraging neural networks and a recent continuous constrained formulation to this problem
Abstract: We propose a novel score-based approach to learning a directed acyclic graph (DAG) from observational data. We adapt a recently proposed continuous constrained optimization formulation to allow for nonlinear relationships between variables using neural networks. This extension allows to model complex interactions while avoiding the combinatorial nature of the problem. In addition to comparing our method to existing continuous optimization methods, we provide missing empirical comparisons to nonlinear greedy search methods. On both synthetic and real-world data sets, this new method outperforms current continuous methods on most tasks while being competitive with existing greedy search methods on important metrics for causal inference.