CGLearn: Consistent Gradient-Based Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Improving generalization and achieving highly predictive, robust machine learning models necessitates learning the underlying causal structure of the variables of interest. A prominent and effective method for this is learning invariant predictors across multiple environments. In this work, we introduce a simple yet powerful approach, CGLearn, which relies on the agreement of gradients across various environments. This agreement serves as a powerful indication of reliable features, while disagreement suggests less reliability due to potential differences in underlying causal mechanisms. Our proposed method demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in both linear and nonlinear settings across various regression and classification tasks. CGLearn shows robust applicability even in the absence of separate environments by exploiting invariance across different subsamples of observational data. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets highlight its effectiveness in diverse scenarios. Our findings underscore the importance of leveraging gradient agreement for learning causal invariance, providing a significant step forward in the field of robust machine learning. The source code of the linear and nonlinear implementation of CGLearn is open-source and available at: https://github.com/hasanjawad001/CGLearn.

Evaluation of Induced Expert Knowledge in Causal Structure Learning by NOTEARS

Causal modeling provides us with powerful counterfactual reasoning and interventional mechanism to generate predictions and reason under various what-if scenarios. However, causal discovery using observation data remains a nontrivial task due to unobserved confounding factors, finite sampling, and changes in the data distribution. These can lead to spurious cause-effect relationships. To mitigate these challenges in practice, researchers augment causal learning with known causal relations. The goal of the paper is to study the impact of expert knowledge on causal relations in the form of additional constraints used in the formulation of the nonparametric NOTEARS. We provide a comprehensive set of comparative analyses of biasing the model using different types of knowledge. We found that (i) knowledge that corrects the mistakes of the NOTEARS model can lead to statistically significant improvements, (ii) constraints on active edges have a larger positive impact on causal discovery than inactive edges, and surprisingly, (iii) the induced knowledge does not correct on average more incorrect active and/or inactive edges than expected. We also demonstrate the behavior of the model and the effectiveness of domain knowledge on a real-world dataset.

Machine Fault Classification using Hamiltonian Neural Networks

A new approach is introduced to classify faults in rotating machinery based on the total energy signature estimated from sensor measurements. The overall goal is to go beyond using black-box models and incorporate additional physical constraints that govern the behavior of mechanical systems. Observational data is used to train Hamiltonian neural networks that describe the conserved energy of the system for normal and various abnormal regimes. The estimated total energy function, in the form of the weights of the Hamiltonian neural network, serves as the new feature vector to discriminate between the faults using off-the-shelf classification models. The experimental results are obtained using the MaFaulDa database, where the proposed model yields a promising area under the curve (AUC) of $0.78$ for the binary classification (normal vs abnormal) and $0.84$ for the multi-class problem (normal, and $5$ different abnormal regimes).

From Causal Pairs to Causal Graphs

Causal structure learning from observational data remains a non-trivial task due to various factors such as finite sampling, unobserved confounding factors, and measurement errors. Constraint-based and score-based methods tend to suffer from high computational complexity due to the combinatorial nature of estimating the directed acyclic graph (DAG). Motivated by the `Cause-Effect Pair' NIPS 2013 Workshop on Causality Challenge, in this paper, we take a different approach and generate a probability distribution over all possible graphs informed by the cause-effect pair features proposed in response to the workshop challenge. The goal of the paper is to propose new methods based on this probabilistic information and compare their performance with traditional and state-of-the-art approaches. Our experiments, on both synthetic and real datasets, show that our proposed methods not only have statistically similar or better performances than some traditional approaches but also are computationally faster.

Explainable Deep Modeling of Tabular Data using TableGraphNet

The vast majority of research on explainability focuses on post-explainability rather than explainable modeling. Namely, an explanation model is derived to explain a complex black box model built with the sole purpose of achieving the highest performance possible. In part, this trend might be driven by the misconception that there is a trade-off between explainability and accuracy. Furthermore, the consequential work on Shapely values, grounded in game theory, has also contributed to a new wave of post-explainability research on better approximations for various machine learning models, including deep learning models. We propose a new architecture that inherently produces explainable predictions in the form of additive feature attributions. Our approach learns a graph representation for each record in the dataset. Attribute centric features are then derived from the graph and fed into a contribution deep set model to produce the final predictions. We show that our explainable model attains the same level of performance as black box models. Finally, we provide an augmented model training approach that leverages the missingness property and yields high levels of consistency (as required for the Shapely values) without loss of accuracy.