Identifiability conjecture for causal models with H1H_1 entropy

Consider the causal model M=({X,Y},E,f,XY,pX,E)\mathcal{M}=(\{X,Y\},E,f,X\rightarrow Y,p_{X,E}), where the discrete random variables XX and YY have nn states, EE is independent of XX and has θ\theta states. The distribution of XX is uniformly randomly selected from the (n1)(n-1)-dimensional simplex, the distribution of EE is uniformly selected from the probability distributions satisfying

H1(E)logn+O(1),H_1(E)\leq \log n+\mathcal{O}(1),

and ff is randomly selected from all functions f:[n]×[θ][n]f:[n]\times[\theta]\rightarrow[n]. Identifiability conjecture. With high probability, any E~\widetilde{E} independent of YY such that

X=g(Y,E~)X=g(Y,\widetilde{E})

for some deterministic function gg entails

H(X)+H(E)<H(Y)+H(E~).H(X)+H(E)<H(Y)+H(\widetilde{E}).

This conjecture proposes that, for randomly selected causal models with low H1H_1 entropy in the environment, the causal direction can be identified by preferring the representation with lower total entropy. The parser provides no evidence resolving the conjecture; its status is therefore open.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Murat Kocaoglu, Alexandros G. Dimakis, Sriram Vishwanath and Babak Hassibi, “Entropic Causal Inference”, arXiv:1611.04035 (2016).

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