CRII: RI: Efficient Structure Learning and Approximation of Networks of Causally Interacting Processes

CRII：RI：因果交互过程网络的有效结构学习和逼近

• 批准号: 1566513
• 负责人: Christopher Quinn
• 金额: $ 17.5万
• 依托单位: Purdue University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-05-01 至 2019-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1566513&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CRII; RI; Efficient; Structure; Learning

The study of networks is important in numerous scientific domains: neuroscience, microbiology, social science, and economics, to name a few. A major challenge in these fields is to identify causal influences in the networks. Experimentation can directly determine causal influences. However, it can be more costly and less practical than passively recording activity in the network and inferring influences from those observations. There are numerous methods that can identify correlations from observational data, though identifying causal relationships often requires expert knowledge or strong modeling assumptions. There is a need for computationally efficient and statistically robust causal inference methods to extract relevant information from network time-series data to facilitate human analysis.This research aims to significantly advance the state of the art in inferring causal influences between time-series. The research develops new and efficient algorithms to learn and approximate the structure of a recently proposed probabilistic graphical model: the directed information graph. The algorithms find optimal or near-optimal approximations of the network topology that have user-controlled sparsity levels, such as the number of edges in the graph or the amount of computation performed. The quality of approximation is measured using Kullback-Leibler divergence. The work also involves proving correctness of the algorithms and developing variations that find provably-good approximations which are robust to noisy or limited data. To achieve these goals, the project develops new bounds for directed information.

网络研究在许多科学领域都很重要：神经科学、微生物学、社会科学和经济学等等。 这些领域的一个主要挑战是确定网络中的因果影响。 实验可以直接确定因果影响。 然而，与被动记录网络中的活动并从这些观察中推断影响相比，它可能成本更高且不太实用。 有许多方法可以从观测数据中识别相关性，但识别因果关系通常需要专业知识或强大的建模假设。 需要计算高效且统计稳健的因果推断方法，从网络时间序列数据中提取相关信息，以促进人类分析。本研究旨在显着推进推断时间序列之间因果影响的最新技术。 该研究开发了新的高效算法来学习和近似最近提出的概率图模型的结构：有向信息图。 该算法找到具有用户控制的稀疏级别的网络拓扑的最佳或接近最佳近似，例如图中的边数或执行的计算量。 近似的质量是使用 Kullback-Leibler 散度来测量的。 这项工作还涉及证明算法的正确性并开发变体，以找到对噪声或有限数据具有鲁棒性的可证明良好的近似值。 为了实现这些目标，该项目为定向信息开发了新的界限。

项目成果

We investigate a novel duality for scalar Gaussian multiple access channels and broadcast channels. The duality we explore is based on shared partial information quantities (e.g. synergy and redundancy). Using lattice theory, we establish a crossover co

我们研究了标量高斯多址信道和广播信道的新颖对偶性。

• 发表时间: 2020-01
• 期刊: International Symposium on Information Theory and Its Applications
• 作者: Niu, Xueyan;Quinn, Christopher J.
• 通讯作者: Quinn, Christopher J.