Empirical Inference

Kernel-based Conditional Independence Test and Application in Causal Discovery

2011

Conference Paper

ei


Conditional independence testing is an important problem, especially in Bayesian network learning and causal discovery. Due to the curse of dimensionality, testing for conditional independence of continuous variables is particularly challenging. We propose a Kernel-based Conditional Independence test (KCI-test), by constructing an appropriate test statistic and deriving its asymptotic distribution under the null hypothesis of conditional independence. The proposed method is computationally efficient and easy to implement. Experimental results show that it outperforms other methods, especially when the conditioning set is large or the sample size is not very large, in which case other methods encounter difficulties.

Author(s): Zhang, K. and Peters, J. and Janzing, D. and Schölkopf, B.
Pages: 804-813
Year: 2011
Month: July
Day: 0
Editors: FG Cozman and A Pfeffer
Publisher: AUAI Press

Department(s): Empirical Inference
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)

Event Name: 27th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2011)
Event Place: Barcelona, Spain

Address: Corvallis, OR, USA
ISBN: 978-0-9749039-7-2

Links: PDF
Web

BibTex

@inproceedings{ZhangPJS2011,
  title = {Kernel-based Conditional Independence Test and Application in Causal Discovery},
  author = {Zhang, K. and Peters, J. and Janzing, D. and Sch{\"o}lkopf, B.},
  pages = {804-813},
  editors = {FG Cozman and A Pfeffer},
  publisher = {AUAI Press},
  address = {Corvallis, OR, USA},
  month = jul,
  year = {2011},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {7}
}