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Stable Specification Search in Structural Equation Models with Latent Variables

Published: 09 September 2019 Publication History

Abstract

In our previous study, we introduced stable specification search for cross-sectional data (S3C). It is an exploratory causal method that combines the concept of stability selection and multi-objective optimization to search for stable and parsimonious causal structures across the entire range of model complexities. S3C, however, is designed to model causal relations among observed variables. In this study, we extended S3C to S3C-Latent, to model linear causal relations between latent variables that are measured through observed proxies. We evaluated S3C-Latent on simulated data and compared the results to those of PC-MIMBuild, an extension of the PC algorithm, the state-of-the-art causal discovery method. The comparison shows that S3C-Latent achieved better performance. We also applied S3C-Latent to real-world data of children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and data about measuring mental abilities among pupils. The results are consistent with those of previous studies.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology  Volume 10, Issue 5
Special Section on Advances in Causal Discovery and Inference and Regular Papers
September 2019
314 pages
ISSN:2157-6904
EISSN:2157-6912
DOI:10.1145/3360733
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 09 September 2019
Accepted: 01 June 2019
Revised: 01 May 2019
Received: 01 August 2018
Published in TIST Volume 10, Issue 5

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Author Tags

  1. Causal modeling
  2. multi-objective evolutionary algorithm
  3. specification search
  4. stability selection
  5. structural equation model with latent variables

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  • (2021)Causal Modeling Between Factors on Quality of Life in Cancer Patients Using S3C-Latent AlgorithmJournal of Information Systems Engineering and Business Intelligence10.20473/jisebi.7.1.74-837:1(74)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2021

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