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Record W4409183695 · doi:10.1515/jci-2024-0037

Causal structure learning in directed, possibly cyclic, graphical models

2025· article· en· W4409183695 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Causal Inference · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicBayesian Modeling and Causal Inference
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGraphical modelComputer scienceArtificial intelligence

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract We consider the problem of learning a directed graph <m:math xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <m:msup> <m:mrow> <m:mi>G</m:mi> </m:mrow> <m:mrow> <m:mo>⋆</m:mo> </m:mrow> </m:msup> </m:math> {G}^{\star } from observational data. We assume that the distribution that gives rise to the samples is Markov and faithful to the graph <m:math xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <m:msup> <m:mrow> <m:mi>G</m:mi> </m:mrow> <m:mrow> <m:mo>⋆</m:mo> </m:mrow> </m:msup> </m:math> {G}^{\star } and that there are no unobserved variables. We do not rely on any further assumptions regarding the graph or the distribution of the variables. Particularly, we allow for directed cycles in <m:math xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <m:msup> <m:mrow> <m:mi>G</m:mi> </m:mrow> <m:mrow> <m:mo>⋆</m:mo> </m:mrow> </m:msup> </m:math> {G}^{\star } and work in the fully nonparametric setting. Given the set of conditional independence statements satisfied by the distribution, we aim to find a directed graph, which satisfies the same <m:math xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <m:mi>d</m:mi> </m:math> d -separation statements as <m:math xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <m:msup> <m:mrow> <m:mi>G</m:mi> </m:mrow> <m:mrow> <m:mo>⋆</m:mo> </m:mrow> </m:msup> </m:math> {G}^{\star } . We propose a hybrid approach consisting of two steps. We first find a partially ordered partition of the vertices of <m:math xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <m:msup> <m:mrow> <m:mi>G</m:mi> </m:mrow> <m:mrow> <m:mo>⋆</m:mo> </m:mrow> </m:msup> </m:math> {G}^{\star } by optimizing a certain score in a greedy fashion. We prove that any optimal partition uniquely characterizes the Markov equivalence class of <m:math xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <m:msup> <m:mrow> <m:mi>G</m:mi> </m:mrow> <m:mrow> <m:mo>⋆</m:mo> </m:mrow> </m:msup> </m:math> {G}^{\star } . Given an optimal partition, we propose an algorithm for constructing a graph in the Markov equivalence class of <m:math xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <m:msup> <m:mrow> <m:mi>G</m:mi> </m:mrow> <m:mrow> <m:mo>⋆</m:mo> </m:mrow> </m:msup> </m:math> {G}^{\star } whose strongly connected components correspond to the elements of the partition, and which are partially ordered according to the partial order of the partition. Our algorithm comes in two versions – one that is provably correct and another one that performs fast in practice.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.754
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.019
GPT teacher head0.291
Teacher spread0.272 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it