English

Decentralized Causal Discovery using Judo Calculus

Artificial Intelligence 2025-10-29 v1

Abstract

We describe a theory and implementation of an intuitionistic decentralized framework for causal discovery using judo calculus, which is formally defined as j-stable causal inference using j-do-calculus in a topos of sheaves. In real-world applications -- from biology to medicine and social science -- causal effects depend on regime (age, country, dose, genotype, or lab protocol). Our proposed judo calculus formalizes this context dependence formally as local truth: a causal claim is proven true on a cover of regimes, not everywhere at once. The Lawvere-Tierney modal operator j chooses which regimes are relevant; j-stability means the claim holds constructively and consistently across that family. We describe an algorithmic and implementation framework for judo calculus, combining it with standard score-based, constraint-based, and gradient-based causal discovery methods. We describe experimental results on a range of domains, from synthetic to real-world datasets from biology and economics. Our experimental results show the computational efficiency gained by the decentralized nature of sheaf-theoretic causal discovery, as well as improved performance over classical causal discovery methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.23942,
  title  = {Decentralized Causal Discovery using Judo Calculus},
  author = {Sridhar Mahadevan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.23942},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

54 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:08:45.812Z