Causal Decision Trees

dc.contributor.authorLi, J.
dc.contributor.authorMa, S.
dc.contributor.authorLe, T.
dc.contributor.authorLiu, L.
dc.contributor.authorLiu, J.
dc.date.issued2017
dc.descriptionLink to a related website: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.03812, Open Access via Unpaywall
dc.description.abstractUncovering causal relationships in data is a major objective of data analytics. Currently, there is a need for scalable and automated methods for causal relationship exploration in data. Classification methods are fast and they could be practical substitutes for finding causal signals in data. However, classification methods are not designed for causal discovery and a classification method may find false causal signals and miss the true ones. In this paper, we develop a causal decision tree (CDT) where nodes have causal interpretations. Our method follows a well-established causal inference framework and makes use of a classic statistical test to establish the causal relationship between a predictor variable and the outcome variable. At the same time, by taking the advantages of normal decision trees, a CDT provides a compact graphical representation of the causal relationships, and the construction of a CDT is fast as a result of the divide and conquer strategy employed, making CDTs practical for representing and finding causal signals in large data sets. Experiment results demonstrate that CDTs can identify meaningful causal relationships and the CDT algorithm is scalable.
dc.identifier.citationIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2017; 29(2):257-271
dc.identifier.doi10.1109/TKDE.2016.2619350
dc.identifier.issn1041-4347
dc.identifier.issn1558-2191
dc.identifier.orcidLe, T. [0000-0002-9732-4313]
dc.identifier.orcidLiu, J. [0000-0002-0794-0404]
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/11541.2/123932
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
dc.relation.fundingARC DP140103617
dc.rightsCopyright 2017
dc.source.urihttps://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2016.2619350
dc.subjectpartial association
dc.subjectdecision tree
dc.subjectcausal relationship
dc.subjectpotential outcome model
dc.titleCausal Decision Trees
dc.typeJournal article
pubs.publication-statusPublished
ror.mmsid9916109549701831

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