Learning to induce causal structure

Nan Rosemary Ke, Silvia Chiappa, Jane X Wang, Jorg Bornschein, Anirudh Goyal, Melanie Rey, Matthew Botvinick, Theophane Weber, Michael Curtis Mozer, Danilo Jimenez Rezende

Keywords: causal 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 \emph{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.

Confirmation: Yes