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On the Identifiability of Mixed Ordinal and Exponential Family Causal DAGs under Linear Parametric Models

arXiv机器学习 2026-09-16 08:01 3 阅读 查看原文

The problem of identifiability in linear parametric models (LPMs) whose nodes follow either an ordered logit model or a regular one-parameter exponential family is evaluated.

The results go beyond classical structural equation models as well as results for nodes with observations from a homogeneous family of distributions.

The main result establishes that the orientation of every edge joining an ordinal node to an exponential-family node is identifiable from the joint distribution alone at every parameter value, provided the ordinal node has at least three categories and the exponential-family node at least three points of support, with no restriction on the sufficient statistic.

Converses show that both requirements are necessary: the three-category requirement is binding only for affine sufficient statistics, and the three-point requirement is binding under the canonical link.

The guarantee extends to orienting every such mixed ordinal-exponential family edge of a given $d$-node undirected skeleton.

Numerical experiments illustrate the theoretical results by successfully separating orientations within a Markov equivalence class, which are indistinguishable by conditional independence alone.