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An Approach to Reduce the Number of Conditional Independence Tests in the PC Algorithm

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KI 2021: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (KI 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12873))

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Abstract

The PC algorithm is one of the most prominent constraint-based methods for learning causal structures from observational data. The algorithm relies on conditional independence (CI) tests to infer the structure and its time consumption heavily depends on the number of performed CI tests. We present a modification, called ED-PC, such that – in the oracle model – both ED-PC and the original PC algorithm infer the same structure. However, by using a new idea allowing the detection of a v-structure without explicit knowledge of a separating set, our method reduces the number of needed CI tests significantly. This is made possible by detecting nonadjacencies considerably earlier.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For exact definitions of the notions used in the algorithm, see Sect. 2.

  2. 2.

    We use iff as shorthand for “if and only if”.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) grant LI634/4-2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany

    Marcel Wienöbst & Maciej Liśkiewicz

Authors
  1. Marcel Wienöbst
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  2. Maciej Liśkiewicz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marcel Wienöbst .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

    Stefan Edelkamp

  2. University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany

    Ralf Möller

  3. University of Leoben, Leoben, Austria

    Elmar Rueckert

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Wienöbst, M., Liśkiewicz, M. (2021). An Approach to Reduce the Number of Conditional Independence Tests in the PC Algorithm. In: Edelkamp, S., Möller, R., Rueckert, E. (eds) KI 2021: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12873. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87626-5_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87626-5_21

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-87625-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-87626-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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