Papers › $χ$SPN: Characteristic Interventional Sum-Product Networks for Causal Inference in...

$χ$SPN: Characteristic Interventional Sum-Product Networks for Causal Inference in Hybrid Domains

14 Aug 2024arXiv:2408.07545archive 2025-07-28

Harsh Poonia, Moritz Willig, Zhongjie Yu, Matej Zečević, Kristian Kersting, Devendra Singh Dhami

Causal inference in hybrid domains, characterized by a mixture of discrete and continuous variables, presents a formidable challenge. We take a step towards this direction and propose Characteristic Interventional Sum-Product Network (χSPN) that is capable of estimating interventional distributions in presence of random variables drawn from mixed distributions. χSPN uses characteristic functions in the leaves of an interventional SPN (iSPN) thereby providing a unified view for discrete and continuous random variables through the Fourier-Stieltjes transform of the probability measures. A neural network is used to estimate the parameters of the learned iSPN using the intervened data. Our experiments on 3 synthetic heterogeneous datasets suggest that χSPN can effectively capture the interventional distributions for both discrete and continuous variables while being expressive and causally adequate. We also show that χSPN generalize to multiple interventions while being trained only on a single intervention data.

PaperPDFCode

Code

harpoonix/chi-spn officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Causal Inference

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Characteristic Functions

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections