aelsem

Python functions for Algebraic Equivalence of Linear Structural Equation Models

Files

• aelsem.py contains many useful functions for dealing with linear structural equation models, including:

  • maximum likelihood fitting with RICF;
  • model selection;
  • grouping models based on theoretical or empirical results;
  • outputting (sets of) mixed graphs to .tex format.

• aelsem_ystruct.py performs a model selection experiment, demonstrating how some of the functions in aelsem.py might be used.

• ystruct/* generates the data for the above experiment (originally analysed by Joris Mooij and Jerome Cremers (2015)). The files in ystruct/dai/ come from libDAI: https://bitbucket.org/jorism/libdai.git

Paper

The theoretical results that this software relies on, as well as the graph pattern notation for succinctly representing sets of mixed graphs, are described in the following paper:

Thijs van Ommen and Joris M. Mooij, Algebraic Equivalence of Linear Structural Equation Models, Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-17), 2017.

If you use this software for a scientific publication, we would appreciate it if you could cite our paper.

Example usage

To get a table of all 4-node acyclic algebraic equivalence classes (as in Appendix B of the UAI 2017 paper):

python aelsem.py
cd tex
pdflatex table.tex

To repeat the experiments from the paper (just for p=10):

  cd ystruct
  ./build.sh
  cd experiments_uai2015
  ./run_experiment_p.sh 10
  cd ../..
  python aelsem_ystruct.py p10_final