We describe a method that infers whether statistical dependences between two observed variables X and Y are due to a \direct" causal link or only due to a connecting causal path that contains an unobserved variable of low complexity, e.g., a binary variable. This problem is motivated by statistical genetics. Given a genetic marker that is correlated with a phenotype of interest, we want to detect whether this marker is causal or it only correlates with a causal one. Our method is based on the analysis of the location of the conditional distributions P(Y jx) in the simplex of all distributions of Y . We report encouraging results on semi-empirical data.
| Author(s): | Janzing, D. and Sgouritsa, E. and Stegle, O. and Peters, J. and Schölkopf, B. |
| Pages: | 383-391 |
| Year: | 2011 |
| Month: | July |
| Day: | 0 |
| Editors: | FG Cozman and A Pfeffer |
| Publisher: | AUAI Press |
| Bibtex Type: | Conference Paper (inproceedings) |
| Address: | Corvallis, OR, USA |
| Event Name: | 27th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2011) |
| Event Place: | Barcelona, Spain |
| Digital: | 0 |
| Electronic Archiving: | grant_archive |
| ISBN: | 978-0-9749039-7-2 |
| Links: | |
BibTex
@inproceedings{JanzingSSPS2011,
title = {Detecting low-complexity unobserved causes},
abstract = {We describe a method that infers whether statistical dependences between two observed variables X and Y are due to a \direct" causal link or only due to a connecting causal
path that contains an unobserved variable of low complexity, e.g., a binary variable. This problem is motivated by statistical genetics. Given a genetic marker that is correlated with a phenotype of interest, we want to
detect whether this marker is causal or it only correlates with a causal one. Our method is based on the analysis of the location of the conditional distributions P(Y jx) in the simplex of all distributions of Y . We report encouraging results on semi-empirical data.},
pages = {383-391},
editors = {FG Cozman and A Pfeffer},
publisher = {AUAI Press},
address = {Corvallis, OR, USA},
month = jul,
year = {2011},
slug = {janzingssps2011},
author = {Janzing, D. and Sgouritsa, E. and Stegle, O. and Peters, J. and Sch{\"o}lkopf, B.},
month_numeric = {7}
}