Design of Experiment for Discovering Directed Mixed Graph

Abstract

We study the design of interventions for causal discovery in simple structural causal models whose causal graphs are directed mixed graphs (DMGs) that may contain directed cycles and bidirected edges representing latent confounding. In such case, observational conditional-independence (CI) information may not identify even the graph skeleton, while CI alone cannot generally detect a bidirected edge coexisting with a directed edge. To this end, we propose a stage-wise framework based on tailored separating systems. Separating-system interventions first recover descendant relations and strongly connected components (SCCs). The SCCs are then ordered by ancestry, and an SCC-Anc separating system recovers the directed subgraph. Given this subgraph, further systems use CI tests interpreted through $d$- or $\sigma$-separation to recover non-adjacent bidirected edges, whose endpoints share no directed edge, and do-see comparisons to recover those coexisting with exactly one directed edge. Under our assumptions, the framework recovers the directed subgraph and every bidirected edge except double-adjacent ones, whose endpoints are connected by a directed edge in each direction. We develop algorithms for unrestricted and $M$-bounded settings, with each experiment targeting at most $M$ variables in the latter. For recovering the directed subgraph and non-adjacent bidirected edges, our upper bounds on the number and maximum size of experiments match corresponding worst-case lower bounds up to logarithmic factors.