English

Learning to Induce Causal Structure

Machine Learning 2022-10-11 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

The fundamental challenge in causal induction is to infer the underlying graph structure given observational and/or interventional data. Most existing causal induction algorithms operate by generating candidate graphs and evaluating them using either score-based methods (including continuous optimization) or independence tests. In our work, we instead treat the inference process as a black box and design a neural network architecture that learns the mapping from both observational and interventional data to graph structures via supervised training on synthetic graphs. The learned model generalizes to new synthetic graphs, is robust to train-test distribution shifts, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on naturalistic graphs for low sample complexity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.04875,
  title  = {Learning to Induce Causal Structure},
  author = {Nan Rosemary Ke and Silvia Chiappa and Jane Wang and Anirudh Goyal and Jorg Bornschein and Melanie Rey and Theophane Weber and Matthew Botvinic and Michael Mozer and Danilo Jimenez Rezende},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.04875},
  year   = {2022}
}