RESUMEN
Counterfactual inference is a useful tool for comparing outcomes of interventions on complex systems. It requires us to represent the system in form of a structural causal model, complete with a causal diagram, probabilistic assumptions on exogenous variables, and functional assignments. Specifying such models can be extremely difficult in practice. The process requires substantial domain expertise, and does not scale easily to large systems, multiple systems, or novel system modifications. At the same time, many application domains, such as molecular biology, are rich in structured causal knowledge that is qualitative in nature. This article proposes a general approach for querying a causal biological knowledge graph, and converting the qualitative result into a quantitative structural causal model that can learn from data to answer the question. We demonstrate the feasibility, accuracy and versatility of this approach using two case studies in systems biology. The first demonstrates the appropriateness of the underlying assumptions and the accuracy of the results. The second demonstrates the versatility of the approach by querying a knowledge base for the molecular determinants of a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)-induced cytokine storm, and performing counterfactual inference to estimate the causal effect of medical countermeasures for severely ill patients.
RESUMEN
A community is a subset of a wider network where the members of that subset are more strongly connected to each other than they are to the rest of the network. In this paper, we consider the problem of identifying and tracking communities in graphs that change over time - dynamic community detection - and present a framework based on Riemannian geometry to aid in this task. Our framework currently supports several important operations such as interpolating between and averaging over graph snapshots. We compare these Riemannian methods with entry-wise linear interpolation and find that the Riemannian methods are generally better suited to dynamic community detection. Next steps with the Riemannian framework include producing a Riemannian least-squares regression method for working with noisy data and developing support methods, such as spectral sparsification, to improve the scalability of our current methods.