Bounding the Family-Wise Error Rate in Local Causal Discovery Using Rademacher Averages (Extended Abstract)

Abstract

Causal discovery from observational data provides candidate causal relationships that need to be validated with ad-hoc experiments. Such experiments usually require major resources, and suitable techniques should therefore be applied to identify candidate relations while limiting false positives. Local causal discovery provides a detailed overview of the variables influencing a target, and it focuses on two sets of variables. The first one, the Parent-Children set, comprises all the elements that are direct causes of the target or that are its direct consequences, while the second one, called the Markov boundary, is the minimal set of variables for the optimal prediction of the target. In this paper we present RAveL, the first suite of algorithms for local causal discovery providing rigorous guarantees on false discoveries. Our algorithms exploit Rademacher averages, a key concept in statistical learning theory, to account for the multiple-hypothesis testing problem in high-dimensional scenarios. Moreover, we prove that state-of-the-art approaches cannot be adapted for the task due to their strong and untestable assumptions, and we complement our analyses with extensive experiments, on synthetic and real-world data.