Learning to Induce Causal Structure

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.