Causal Discovery with a Mixture of DAGs
This addresses limitations in graphical models for biomedical applications where causal structures vary over time or between groups, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing DAG frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling causal processes that involve cycles, temporal evolution, or population heterogeneity by proposing a mixture of directed cyclic graphs (DAGs) and a Causal Inference over Mixtures algorithm, with experiments showing improved performance over prior methods.
Causal processes in biomedicine may contain cycles, evolve over time or differ between populations. However, many graphical models cannot accommodate these conditions. We propose to model causation using a mixture of directed cyclic graphs (DAGs), where the joint distribution in a population follows a DAG at any single point in time but potentially different DAGs across time. We also introduce an algorithm called Causal Inference over Mixtures that uses longitudinal data to infer a graph summarizing the causal relations generated from a mixture of DAGs. Experiments demonstrate improved performance compared to prior approaches.