Learning Sparse Causal Gaussian Networks With Experimental Intervention: Regularization and Coordinate Descent

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Fu, Fei; Zhou, Qing
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0162-1459
• DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2012.754359
• 发表日期: 2013
• 页码: 288-300
• 关键词: penalized likelihood; variable selection; Graphical Models; adaptive lasso; CONVERGENCE; inference

摘要

Causal networks are graphically represented by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Learning causal networks from data is a challenging problem due to the size of the space of DAGs, the acyclicity constraint placed on the graphical structures, and the presence of equivalence classes. In this article, we develop an L-1-penalized likelihood approach to estimate the structure of causal Gaussian networks. A blockwise coordinate descent algorithm, which takes advantage of the acyclicity constraint, is proposed for seeking a local maximizer of the penalized likelihood. We establish that model selection consistency for causal Gaussian networks can be achieved with the adaptive lasso penalty and sufficient experimental interventions. Simulation and real data examples are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. In particular, our method shows satisfactory performance for DAGs with 200 nodes, which have about 20,000 free parameters. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.