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Related papers: Causal Discovery with Reinforcement Learning

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The causal dependence in data is often characterized by Directed Acyclic Graphical (DAG) models, widely used in many areas. Causal discovery aims to recover the DAG structure using observational data. This paper focuses on causal discovery…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Boxin Zhao , Weishi Wang , Dingyuan Zhu , Ziqi Liu , Dong Wang , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou , Mladen Kolar

We consider the problem of learning causal directed acyclic graphs from an observational joint distribution. One can use these graphs to predict the outcome of interventional experiments, from which data are often not available. We show…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-08-18 Jonas Peters , Joris Mooij , Dominik Janzing , Bernhard Schölkopf

We study the problem of experiment design to learn causal structures from interventional data. We consider an active learning setting in which the experimenter decides to intervene on one of the variables in the system in each step and uses…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Amir Amirinezhad , Saber Salehkaleybar , Matin Hashemi

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) for a class of problems with bagged decision times. A bag contains a finite sequence of consecutive decision times. The transition dynamics are non-Markovian and non-stationary within a bag. All…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-08 Daiqi Gao , Hsin-Yu Lai , Predrag Klasnja , Susan A. Murphy

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) improves the efficiency of long-horizon reinforcement-learning tasks with sparse rewards by decomposing the task into a hierarchy of subgoals. The main challenge of HRL is efficient discovery of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Sadegh Khorasani , Saber Salehkaleybar , Negar Kiyavash , Matthias Grossglauser

Integrating causal inference (CI) with reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm to address critical limitations in classical RL, including low explainability, lack of robustness and generalization failures. Traditional…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Cristiano da Costa Cunha , Wei Liu , Tim French , Ajmal Mian

Under stringent model type and variable distribution assumptions, differentiable score-based causal discovery methods learn a directed acyclic graph (DAG) from observational data by evaluating candidate graphs over an average score…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 An Zhang , Fangfu Liu , Wenchang Ma , Zhibo Cai , Xiang Wang , Tat-seng Chua

Causal discovery, the learning of causality in a data mining scenario, has been of strong scientific and theoretical interest as a starting point to identify "what causes what?" Contingent on assumptions and a proper learning algorithm, it…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-23 Gabriel Ruiz , Oscar Hernan Madrid Padilla , Qing Zhou

Inducing causal relationships from observations is a classic problem in machine learning. Most work in causality starts from the premise that the causal variables themselves are observed. However, for AI agents such as robots trying to make…

Understanding the causal relationships between data variables can provide crucial insights into the construction of tabular datasets. Most existing causality learning methods typically focus on applying a single identifiable causal model,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Hristo Petkov , Calum MacLellan , Feng Dong

Causal inference methods for observational data are increasingly recognized as a valuable complement to randomized clinical trials (RCTs). They can, under strong assumptions, emulate RCTs or help refine their focus. Our approach to causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-14 Carlo Berzuini , Davide Luciani , Hiren C. Patel

Despite several advances in recent years, learning causal structures represented by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) remains a challenging task in high dimensional settings when the graphs to be learned are not sparse. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Zhuangyan Fang , Shengyu Zhu , Jiji Zhang , Yue Liu , Zhitang Chen , Yangbo He

Discovering causal structure from purely observational data (i.e., causal discovery), aiming to identify causal relationships among variables, is a fundamental task in machine learning. The recent invention of differentiable score-based DAG…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Fangfu Liu , Wenchang Ma , An Zhang , Xiang Wang , Yueqi Duan , Tat-Seng Chua

In recent years, deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been successful in various combinatorial search domains, such as two-player games and scientific discovery. However, directly applying deep RL in planning domains is still challenging.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Dieqiao Feng , Carla P. Gomes , Bart Selman

This paper studies the causal representation learning problem when the latent causal variables are observed indirectly through an unknown linear transformation. The objectives are: (i) recovering the unknown linear transformation (up to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-02 Burak Varici , Emre Acarturk , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Abhishek Kumar , Ali Tajer

A common theme in causal inference is learning causal relationships between observed variables, also known as causal discovery. This is usually a daunting task, given the large number of candidate causal graphs and the combinatorial nature…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-11 Romain Lopez , Jan-Christian Hütter , Jonathan K. Pritchard , Aviv Regev

Regularization improves generalization of supervised models to out-of-sample data. Prior works have shown that prediction in the causal direction (effect from cause) results in lower testing error than the anti-causal direction. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-29 Trent Kyono , Yao Zhang , Mihaela van der Schaar

Learning the structure of a causal graphical model using both observational and interventional data is a fundamental problem in many scientific fields. A promising direction is continuous optimization for score-based methods, which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-28 Phillip Lippe , Taco Cohen , Efstratios Gavves

Bayesian causal discovery offers the power to quantify epistemic uncertainties among a broad range of structurally diverse causal theories potentially explaining the data, represented in forms of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Nu Hoang , Bao Duong , Thin Nguyen

Random directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) based on imposing an order on Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi and scale free random graphs are widely used for evaluating causal discovery algorithms. We show that in such DAGs, the set of nodes reachable via open…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-08 Alexander G. Reisach , Antoine Chambaz , Gilles Blanchard , Sebastian Weichwald