General congruence transformation to a diagonal-noise adjacency representation

Let ?\boldsymbol{\boldsymbol{\text{?}}} denote the covariance and adjacency objects in the source construction, with observed and unobserved index sets JOJ_O and JUJ_U. Let WW' be the adjacency matrix in the root-confounder data-generation model, and let QQ satisfy the displayed matrix equation and the requirements referenced in the source.

General diagonal-noise representation conjecture. There exists a general adjacency matrix

W=QWQ1W”=QW'Q^{-1}

of the displayed block form, with [W]JU,JOotot0[W]_{J_U,J_O} ot ot\to 0 and [W]JUotot0[W]_{J_U} ot ot\to 0, such that WW” with independent idiosyncratic variables represents the same observed data, preserving Sigma11=SigmaY=E(YYT) Sigma_{11}= Sigma_Y= E(YY^T); equivalently, the corresponding noise covariance Omega=E(epsilonepsilonT) Omega”= E( epsilon” epsilon”^T) is diagonal, where epsilon=Qepsilon epsilon”=Q epsilon'.

The statement is presented as future work after a special-case construction, and the source supplies no evidence of resolution. It concerns whether latent-confounding representations can be transformed into observationally equivalent representations with diagonal idiosyncratic noise.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Xudong Sun, Alex Markham, Pratik Misra and Carsten Marr, “Addressing pitfalls in implicit unobserved confounding synthesis using explicit block hierarchical ancestral sampling”, arXiv:2503.09194 (2025).

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