LiNGAM-SF: Causal Structural Learning Method With Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Models for Streaming Features.

Abstract

The causal structure learning for streaming features (CSLSFs) faces the following challenges: 1) the precision of learned causal structures is limited due to the score-based learning method and 2) they fail to detect the latent confounders. To address the challenges, this article proposes a novel causal structure learning method with linear non-Gaussian acyclic models for streaming features (LiNGAM-SFs), which utilizes the causal identifiability of the data. It is the first time to utilize LiNGAMs for online causal structure learning. First, we utilize the classical SF algorithm to learn the causal skeleton. This article provides the property of this skeleton, proving that two adjacent variables on an edge is one of three possible structures. Second, we give two propositions and identify the causal directions in the presence of latent variables (ICDPLV) subalgorithm to distinguish among the three structures and precisely identify the causal directions. In addition, the subalgorithm can output a candidate set of latent confounders from a local perspective. Finally, the detecting latent confounder (DLC) subalgorithm detects the latent confounders in the candidate set with a global perspective. The precision of the proposed method is increased at least by 11% on average than those of the state-of-the-art method. Furthermore, the experiments verify that the LiNGAM-SF method is able to detect the latent confounders.