Abstract
Causal models promise many benefits if applied correctly to machine learning tasks. However, in order to leverage fine grained causal information, it is often useful to reduce the complexity of the causal connections by producing an abstracted version of the graph. In this paper, we introduce semantic causal abstractions, a scheme for constructing abstracted causal graphs in order to provide a domain-independent approximation to formal causal abstraction for unstructured textual data. We then analyze the effects that this type of abstraction has on the performance of a causal graph-based prediction model under multiple semantic representations. Our experiments on two stock prediction tasks provide evidence for the efficacy of semantic causal abstraction to improve prediction performance and give insight into the consistency of the optimal semantic causal abstraction levels across tasks.
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Notes
- 1.
This dataset is publically available and can be accessed at https://www.kaggle.com/miguelaenlle/massive-stock-news-analysis-db-for-nlpbacktests.
- 2.
This dataset is restricted for use to the participating members of the competition only.
- 3.
This data is no longer publicly available.
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Strelnikoff, S., Jammalamadaka, A., Lu, TC. (2022). Semantic Causal Abstraction forĀ Event Prediction. In: Holzinger, A., Kieseberg, P., Tjoa, A.M., Weippl, E. (eds) Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction. CD-MAKE 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13480. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14463-9_12
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