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Akito Fujii

Publications and source records attributed to Akito Fujii.

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DCILP: A Distributed Approach for Large-Scale Causal Structure Learning

Causal learning tackles the computationally demanding task of estimating causal graphs. This paper introduces a new divide-and-conquer approach for causal graph learning, called DCILP. In the divide phase, the Markov blanket MB($X_i$) of each variable $X_i$ is identified, and causal learning subproblems associated with each MB($X_i$) are independently addressed in parallel. This approach benefits from a more favorable ratio between the number of data samples and the number of variables considered. In counterpart, it can be adversely affected by the presence of hidden confounders, as variables external to MB($X_i$) might influence those within it. The reconciliation of the local causal graphs generated during the divide phase is a challenging combinatorial optimization problem, especially in large-scale applications. The main novelty of DCILP is an original formulation of this reconciliation as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem, which can be delegated and efficiently handled by an ILP solver. Through experiments on medium to large scale graphs, and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods, DCILP demonstrates significant improvements in terms of computational complexity, while preserving the learning accuracy on real-world problem and suffering at most a slight loss of accuracy on synthetic problems.

cs.LG

Reeb Complements for Exploring Inclusions Between Isosurfaces From Two Scalar Fields

This article proposes to integrate two Reeb graphs with the information of their isosurfaces' inclusion relation. As computing power evolves, there arise numerical data that have small-scale physics inside larger ones -- for example, small clouds in a simulation can be contained inside an atmospheric layer, which is further contained in an enormous hurricane. Extracting such inclusions between isosurfaces is a challenge for isosurfacing: the user would have to explore the vast combinations of isosurfaces $(f_1^{-1}(l_1), f_2^{-1}(l_2))$ from scalar fields $f_i: M(n) \to \mathbb{R}$, $i = 1, 2$, where $M$ is an $n$-dimensional domain manifold and $f_i$ are physical quantities, to find inclusion of one isosurface within another. For this, we propose the \textit{Reeb complement}, a topological space that integrates two Reeb graphs with the inclusion relation. The Reeb complement has a natural partition that classifies equivalent containment of isosurfaces. This is a handy characteristic that lets the Reeb complement serve as an overview of the inclusion relationship in the data. We also propose level-of-detail control of the inclusions through simplification of the Reeb complement. We demonstrate that the relationship of two independent scalar fields can be extracted by taking the product of Reeb graphs (which we call the Reeb product) and by then subtracting the projection of the Reeb space, which opens up a new possibility for feature analysis.

cs.CG

Learning Large Causal Structures from Inverse Covariance Matrix via Sparse Matrix Decomposition

Learning causal structures from observational data is a fundamental problem facing important computational challenges when the number of variables is large. In the context of linear structural equation models (SEMs), this paper focuses on learning causal structures from the inverse covariance matrix. The proposed method, called ICID for Independence-preserving Decomposition from Inverse Covariance matrix, is based on continuous optimization of a matrix decomposition model that preserves the nonzero patterns of the inverse covariance matrix. Through theoretical and empirical evidences, we show that ICID efficiently identifies the sought directed acyclic graph (DAG) assuming the knowledge of noise variances. Moreover, ICID is shown empirically to be robust under bounded misspecification of noise variances in the case where the noise variances are non-equal. The proposed method enjoys a low complexity, as reflected by its time efficiency in the experiments, and also enables a novel regularization scheme that yields highly accurate solutions on the Simulated fMRI data (Smith et al., 2011) in comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms.

cs.LG