Causal Discovery (CD) is the process of identifying the cause-effect relationships among the variables from data. Over the years, several methods have been developed primarily based on the statistical properties of data to uncover the underlying causal mechanism. In this study we introduce the common terminologies in causal discovery, and provide a comprehensive discussion of the approaches designed to identify the causal edges in different settings. We further discuss some of the benchmark datasets available for evaluating the performance of the causal discovery algorithms, available tools to perform causal discovery readily, and the common metrics used to evaluate these methods. Finally, we conclude by presenting the common challenges involved in CD and also, discuss the applications of CD in multiple areas of interest.
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Understanding the laws that govern a phenomenon is the core of scientific progress. This is especially true when the goal is to model the interplay between different aspects in a causal fashion. Indeed, causal inference itself is specifically designed to quantify the underlying relationships that connect a cause to its effect. Causal discovery is a branch of the broader field of causality in which causal graphs is recovered from data (whenever possible), enabling the identification and estimation of causal effects. In this paper, we explore recent advancements in a unified manner, provide a consistent overview of existing algorithms developed under different settings, report useful tools and data, present real-world applications to understand why and how these methods can be fruitfully exploited.
Causal inference is fundamental to empirical scientific discoveries in natural and social sciences; however, in the process of conducting causal inference, data management problems can lead to false discoveries. Two such problems are (i) not having all attributes required for analysis, and (ii) misidentifying which attributes are to be included in the analysis. Analysts often only have access to partial data, and they critically rely on (often unavailable or incomplete) domain knowledge to identify attributes to include for analysis, which is often given in the form of a causal DAG. We argue that data management techniques can surmount both of these challenges. In this work, we introduce the Causal Data Integration (CDI) problem, in which unobserved attributes are mined from external sources and a corresponding causal DAG is automatically built. We identify key challenges and research opportunities in designing a CDI system, and present a system architecture for solving the CDI problem. Our preliminary experimental results demonstrate that solving CDI is achievable and pave the way for future research.
While Reinforcement Learning (RL) achieves tremendous success in sequential decision-making problems of many domains, it still faces key challenges of data inefficiency and the lack of interpretability. Interestingly, many researchers have leveraged insights from the causality literature recently, bringing forth flourishing works to unify the merits of causality and address well the challenges from RL. As such, it is of great necessity and significance to collate these Causal Reinforcement Learning (CRL) works, offer a review of CRL methods, and investigate the potential functionality from causality toward RL. In particular, we divide existing CRL approaches into two categories according to whether their causality-based information is given in advance or not. We further analyze each category in terms of the formalization of different models, ranging from the Markov Decision Process (MDP), Partially Observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP), Multi-Arm Bandits (MAB), and Dynamic Treatment Regime (DTR). Moreover, we summarize the evaluation matrices and open sources while we discuss emerging applications, along with promising prospects for the future development of CRL.
Deep models, e.g., CNNs and Vision Transformers, have achieved impressive achievements in many vision tasks in the closed world. However, novel classes emerge from time to time in our ever-changing world, requiring a learning system to acquire new knowledge continually. For example, a robot needs to understand new instructions, and an opinion monitoring system should analyze emerging topics every day. Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) enables the learner to incorporate the knowledge of new classes incrementally and build a universal classifier among all seen classes. Correspondingly, when directly training the model with new class instances, a fatal problem occurs -- the model tends to catastrophically forget the characteristics of former ones, and its performance drastically degrades. There have been numerous efforts to tackle catastrophic forgetting in the machine learning community. In this paper, we survey comprehensively recent advances in deep class-incremental learning and summarize these methods from three aspects, i.e., data-centric, model-centric, and algorithm-centric. We also provide a rigorous and unified evaluation of 16 methods in benchmark image classification tasks to find out the characteristics of different algorithms empirically. Furthermore, we notice that the current comparison protocol ignores the influence of memory budget in model storage, which may result in unfair comparison and biased results. Hence, we advocate fair comparison by aligning the memory budget in evaluation, as well as several memory-agnostic performance measures. The source code to reproduce these evaluations is available at //github.com/zhoudw-zdw/CIL_Survey/
Time series anomaly detection has applications in a wide range of research fields and applications, including manufacturing and healthcare. The presence of anomalies can indicate novel or unexpected events, such as production faults, system defects, or heart fluttering, and is therefore of particular interest. The large size and complex patterns of time series have led researchers to develop specialised deep learning models for detecting anomalous patterns. This survey focuses on providing structured and comprehensive state-of-the-art time series anomaly detection models through the use of deep learning. It providing a taxonomy based on the factors that divide anomaly detection models into different categories. Aside from describing the basic anomaly detection technique for each category, the advantages and limitations are also discussed. Furthermore, this study includes examples of deep anomaly detection in time series across various application domains in recent years. It finally summarises open issues in research and challenges faced while adopting deep anomaly detection models.
The concept of causality plays an important role in human cognition . In the past few decades, causal inference has been well developed in many fields, such as computer science, medicine, economics, and education. With the advancement of deep learning techniques, it has been increasingly used in causal inference against counterfactual data. Typically, deep causal models map the characteristics of covariates to a representation space and then design various objective optimization functions to estimate counterfactual data unbiasedly based on the different optimization methods. This paper focuses on the survey of the deep causal models, and its core contributions are as follows: 1) we provide relevant metrics under multiple treatments and continuous-dose treatment; 2) we incorporate a comprehensive overview of deep causal models from both temporal development and method classification perspectives; 3) we assist a detailed and comprehensive classification and analysis of relevant datasets and source code.
Structural data well exists in Web applications, such as social networks in social media, citation networks in academic websites, and threads data in online forums. Due to the complex topology, it is difficult to process and make use of the rich information within such data. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great advantages on learning representations for structural data. However, the non-transparency of the deep learning models makes it non-trivial to explain and interpret the predictions made by GNNs. Meanwhile, it is also a big challenge to evaluate the GNN explanations, since in many cases, the ground-truth explanations are unavailable. In this paper, we take insights of Counterfactual and Factual (CF^2) reasoning from causal inference theory, to solve both the learning and evaluation problems in explainable GNNs. For generating explanations, we propose a model-agnostic framework by formulating an optimization problem based on both of the two casual perspectives. This distinguishes CF^2 from previous explainable GNNs that only consider one of them. Another contribution of the work is the evaluation of GNN explanations. For quantitatively evaluating the generated explanations without the requirement of ground-truth, we design metrics based on Counterfactual and Factual reasoning to evaluate the necessity and sufficiency of the explanations. Experiments show that no matter ground-truth explanations are available or not, CF^2 generates better explanations than previous state-of-the-art methods on real-world datasets. Moreover, the statistic analysis justifies the correlation between the performance on ground-truth evaluation and our proposed metrics.
Data processing and analytics are fundamental and pervasive. Algorithms play a vital role in data processing and analytics where many algorithm designs have incorporated heuristics and general rules from human knowledge and experience to improve their effectiveness. Recently, reinforcement learning, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in particular, is increasingly explored and exploited in many areas because it can learn better strategies in complicated environments it is interacting with than statically designed algorithms. Motivated by this trend, we provide a comprehensive review of recent works focusing on utilizing DRL to improve data processing and analytics. First, we present an introduction to key concepts, theories, and methods in DRL. Next, we discuss DRL deployment on database systems, facilitating data processing and analytics in various aspects, including data organization, scheduling, tuning, and indexing. Then, we survey the application of DRL in data processing and analytics, ranging from data preparation, natural language processing to healthcare, fintech, etc. Finally, we discuss important open challenges and future research directions of using DRL in data processing and analytics.
Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing research direction owing to the large amount of available data and low budget requirement, compared with randomized controlled trials. Embraced with the rapidly developed machine learning area, various causal effect estimation methods for observational data have sprung up. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of causal inference methods under the potential outcome framework, one of the well known causal inference framework. The methods are divided into two categories depending on whether they require all three assumptions of the potential outcome framework or not. For each category, both the traditional statistical methods and the recent machine learning enhanced methods are discussed and compared. The plausible applications of these methods are also presented, including the applications in advertising, recommendation, medicine and so on. Moreover, the commonly used benchmark datasets as well as the open-source codes are also summarized, which facilitate researchers and practitioners to explore, evaluate and apply the causal inference methods.
Deep learning has been shown successful in a number of domains, ranging from acoustics, images to natural language processing. However, applying deep learning to the ubiquitous graph data is non-trivial because of the unique characteristics of graphs. Recently, a significant amount of research efforts have been devoted to this area, greatly advancing graph analyzing techniques. In this survey, we comprehensively review different kinds of deep learning methods applied to graphs. We divide existing methods into three main categories: semi-supervised methods including Graph Neural Networks and Graph Convolutional Networks, unsupervised methods including Graph Autoencoders, and recent advancements including Graph Recurrent Neural Networks and Graph Reinforcement Learning. We then provide a comprehensive overview of these methods in a systematic manner following their history of developments. We also analyze the differences of these methods and how to composite different architectures. Finally, we briefly outline their applications and discuss potential future directions.
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