English

Contextual Causal Bayesian Optimisation

Machine Learning 2026-02-04 v4

Abstract

We introduce a unified framework for contextual and causal Bayesian optimisation, which aims to design intervention policies maximising the expectation of a target variable. Our approach leverages both observed contextual information and known causal graph structures to guide the search. Within this framework, we propose a novel algorithm that jointly optimises over policies and the sets of variables on which these policies are defined. This thereby extends and unifies two previously distinct approaches: Causal Bayesian Optimisation and Contextual Bayesian Optimisation, while also addressing their limitations in scenarios that yield suboptimal results. We derive worst-case and instance-dependent high-probability regret bounds for our algorithm. We report experimental results across diverse environments, corroborating that our approach achieves sublinear regret and reduces sample complexity in high-dimensional settings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.12412,
  title  = {Contextual Causal Bayesian Optimisation},
  author = {Vahan Arsenyan and Antoine Grosnit and Haitham Bou-Ammar and Arnak Dalalyan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.12412},
  year   = {2026}
}