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