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Jiji Zhang

8 accepted papers

2024

Natural Counterfactuals With Necessary Backtracking

NeurIPS 2024poster

Counterfactual reasoning is pivotal in human cognition and especially important for providing explanations and making decisions. While Judea Pearl's influential approach is theoretically elegant, its generation of a counterfactual scenario often requires too much deviation from the observed scenario…

2024

On Causal Discovery in the Presence of Deterministic Relations

NeurIPS 2024poster

Many causal discovery methods typically rely on the assumption of independent noise, yet real-life situations often involve deterministic relationships. In these cases, observed variables are represented as deterministic functions of their parental variables without noise. When determinism is presen…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2022

Ancestral Instrument Method for Causal Inference without Complete Knowledge

IJCAI 2022poster

Unobserved confounding is the main obstacle to causal effect estimation from observational data. Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used for causal effect estimation when there exist latent confounders. With the standard IV method, when a given IV is valid, unbiased estimation can be obtained,…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2022

Causal Identification under Markov equivalence: Calculus, Algorithm, and Completeness

NeurIPS 2022accept

One common task in many data sciences applications is to answer questions about the effect of new interventions, like: `what would happen to $Y$ if we make $X$ equal to $x$ while observing covariates $Z=z$?'. Formally, this is known as conditional effect identification, where the goal is to determin…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2022

Reframed GES with a neural conditional dependence measure

UAI 2022poster

In a nonparametric setting, the causal structure is often identifiable only up to Markov equivalence, and for the purpose of causal inference, it is useful to learn a graphical representation of the Markov equivalence class (MEC). In this paper, we revisit the Greedy Equivalence Search (GES) algori…

2021

Reliable Causal Discovery with Improved Exact Search and Weaker Assumptions

NeurIPS 2021poster

Many of the causal discovery methods rely on the faithfulness assumption to guarantee asymptotic correctness. However, the assumption can be approximately violated in many ways, leading to sub-optimal solutions. Although there is a line of research in Bayesian network structure learning that focuses…

2019

Identification of Conditional Causal Effects under Markov Equivalence

NeurIPS 2019spotlight

Causal identification is the problem of deciding whether a post-interventional distribution is computable from a combination of qualitative knowledge about the data-generating process, which is encoded in a causal diagram, and an observational distribution. A generalization of this problem restricts…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar