Mechanism Learning: reverse causal inference in the presence of multiple unknown confounding through causally weighted Gaussian mixture models

TL;DR

This paper introduces mechanism learning using causally weighted Gaussian Mixture Models to enable reverse causal inference in observational data, effectively deconfounding variables and improving causal prediction accuracy in high-dimensional, nonlinear settings.

Contribution

It proposes a novel CW-GMM method for deconfounding data, allowing causal inference even with unknown confounders, applicable to high-dimensional and nonlinear effects.

Findings

Successfully applied to synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real datasets.

Outperforms naive ML models by reducing bias from spurious associations.

Enables reliable causal prediction in complex observational data.

Abstract

A major limitation of machine learning (ML) prediction models is that they recover associational, rather than causal, predictive relationships between variables. In high-stakes automation applications of ML this is problematic, as the model often learns spurious, non-causal associations. This paper proposes mechanism learning, a simple method which uses causally weighted Gaussian Mixture Models (CW-GMMs) to deconfound observational data such that any appropriate ML model is forced to learn predictive relationships between effects and their causes (reverse causal inference), despite the potential presence of multiple unknown and unmeasured confounding. Effect variables can be very high-dimensional, and the predictive relationship nonlinear, as is common in ML applications. This novel method is widely applicable, the only requirement is the existence of a set of mechanism variables mediating the cause (prediction target) and effect (feature data), which is independent of the (unmeasured) confounding variables. We test our method on fully synthetic, semi-synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that it can discover reliable, unbiased, causal ML predictors where by contrast, the same ML predictor trained naively using classical supervised learning on the original observational data, is heavily biased by spurious associations. We provide code to implement the results in the paper, online.