Papers › Learning DAGs without imposing acyclicity

Learning DAGs without imposing acyclicity

4 Jun 2020arXiv:2006.03005archive 2025-07-28

Gherardo Varando

We explore if it is possible to learn a directed acyclic graph (DAG) from data without imposing explicitly the acyclicity constraint. In particular, for Gaussian distributions, we frame structural learning as a sparse matrix factorization problem and we empirically show that solving an ℓ₁-penalized optimization yields to good recovery of the true graph and, in general, to almost-DAG graphs. Moreover, this approach is computationally efficient and is not affected by the explosion of combinatorial complexity as in classical structural learning algorithms.

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