Dresden 2017 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 50: Networks: From Topology to Dynamics I (Joint Session SOE/DY/BP)
BP 50.4: Talk
Thursday, March 23, 2017, 10:30–10:45, GÖR 226
Phase transition in detecting causal relationships from obervationaland interventional data — •Alexander K. Hartmann1 and Gregory Nuel2 — 1Institut for Physics, University of Oldenburg, Germany — 2Laboratory of Probability and Stochastic Models (LPMA), Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France
Analysing data of, e.g., gene-expression experiments, and modelling it via network-based approaches is one of the main data analysis tasks in modern science. If one is interested in modelling correlations, approaches like the inverse Ising model can be used, which is already algorithmically challenging. If one wants to analyse even causal relationships, i.e., beyond correlations, it becomes even harder.
One way out is to include interventions to the system, e.g., by knocking out genes when studying gene expression. This allows, in principle, to get a grip on the causal structure of a system. Here, we model the data using Gaussian Bayesian networks defined on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Our approach [1] allows for multiple interventions in each single experiment and calculating joint maximum likelihoods (MLs) for the complete network. Furthermore, we have to sample different causal orderings, which induce different DAGs. The sampling is efficient because we approximate the full ML by probabilities of orderings of triplets. This allows us to study the quality of the causality detection as a function of the fraction of interventional experiments. We observe an information phase transition between phases where the causal structure cannot be detected and where it can be detected.
[1] A. Rau, F. Jaffrézic, and G. Nuel, BMC Sys. Biol. 7:111 (2013)