Ordinary supervised learning is useful when we have paired training data of
input $X$ and output $Y$. However, such paired data can be difficult to collect
in practice. In this paper, we consider the task of predicting $Y$ from $X$
when we have no paired data of them, but we have two separate, independent
datasets of $X$ and $Y$ each observed with some mediating variable $U$, that
is, we have two datasets $S_X = \{(X_i, U_i)\}$ and $S_Y = \{(U'_j, Y'_j)\}$. A
naive approach is to predict $U$ from $X$ using $S_X$ and then $Y$ from $U$
using $S_Y$, but we show that this is not statistically consistent. Moreover,
predicting $U$ can be more difficult than predicting $Y$ in practice, e.g.,
when $U$ has higher dimensionality. To circumvent the difficulty, we propose a
new method that avoids predicting $U$ but directly learns $Y = f(X)$ by
training $f(X)$ with $S_{X}$ to predict $h(U)$ which is trained with $S_{Y}$ to
approximate $Y$. We prove statistical consistency and error bounds of our
method and experimentally confirm its practical usefulness.

本文介绍了一种避免预测中介变量的新方法，该方法通过直接学习来自两个独立数据集的参数 $X,Y$ 之间的映射关系，证明了其在统计学上的一致性，并通过实验证实了其实用性。