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Design of Experiment for Discovering Directed Mixed Graph

Machine Learning 2025-09-03 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

We study the problem of experimental design for accurately identifying the causal graph structure of a simple structural causal model (SCM), where the underlying graph may include both cycles and bidirected edges induced by latent confounders. The presence of cycles renders it impossible to recover the graph skeleton using observational data alone, while confounding can further invalidate traditional conditional independence (CI) tests in certain scenarios. To address these challenges, we establish lower bounds on both the maximum number of variables that can be intervened upon in a single experiment and the total number of experiments required to identify all directed edges and non-adjacent bidirected edges. Leveraging both CI tests and do see tests, and accounting for dd separation and σ\sigma separation, we develop two classes of algorithms, i.e., bounded and unbounded, that can recover all causal edges except for double adjacent bidirected edges. We further show that, up to logarithmic factors, the proposed algorithms are tight with respect to the derived lower bounds.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.01887,
  title  = {Design of Experiment for Discovering Directed Mixed Graph},
  author = {Haijie Xu and Chen Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.01887},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:16:31.084Z