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Archive / INF Seminars / INF_2022_11_11_StefanoPeluso

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	Network Structure Learning under Uncertain Interventions

Host: Prof. Ernst C. Wit

Friday

11.11

USI Campus EST, room D1.14, Sector D

12:15 - 13:30


	Stefano Peluso Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca

Abstract:
Gaussian Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) represent a powerful tool for learning the network of dependencies among variables, a task which is of primary interest in many fields and specifically in biology. Different DAGs may encode equivalent conditional independence structures, implying limited ability, with observational data, to identify causal relations. In many contexts however, measurements are collected under heterogeneous settings where variables are subject to exogenous interventions. Interventional data can improve the structure learning process whenever the targets of an intervention are known. However, these are often uncertain or completely unknown, as in the context of drug target discovery. We propose a Bayesian method for learning dependence structures and intervention targets from data subject to interventions on unknown variables of the system. Selected features of our approach include a DAG Wishart prior on the DAG parameters, and the use of variable selection priors to express uncertainty on the targets. We provide theoretical results on the correct asymptotic identification of intervention targets and derive sufficient conditions for Bayes factor and posterior ratio consistency of the graph structure. Our method is applied in simulations and real-data world settings, to analyze perturbed protein data and assess antiepileptic drug therapies.

Biography:
Stefano Peluso is associate professor in Statistics at the Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca.