Poster
A Robust Method to Discover Causal or Anticausal Relation
Yu Yao · Yang Zhou · Bo Han · Mingming Gong · Kun Zhang · Tongliang Liu
Hall 3 + Hall 2B #574
Understanding whether the data generative process follows causal or anticausal relations is important for many applications. Existing causal discovery methods struggle with high-dimensional perceptual data such as images. Moreover, they require well-labeled data, which may not be feasible due to measurement error. In this paper, we propose a robust method to detect whether the data generative process is causal or anticausal. To determine the causal or anticausal relation, we identify an asymmetric property: under the causal relation, the instance distribution does not contain information about the noisy class-posterior distribution. We also propose a practical method to verify this via a noise injection approach. Our method is robust to label errors and is designed to handle both large-scale and high-dimensional datasets effectively. Both theoretical analyses and empirical results on a variety of datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in determining the causal or anticausal direction of the data generative process.