Bayesian causal discovery is widely used for its ability to quantify epistemic uncertainty over directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) through posterior inference. However, its behaviour under latent confounding remains poorly understood, as existing work typically notes that confounding breaks identifiability without characterising how the posterior distribution over DAGs responds. In this work, we analyse posterior behaviour under latent confounding in linear Gaussian causal models, focusing on additive latent confounding between exactly two observed variables. We derive a critical correlation threshold above which the score function favours graphs with a spurious edge between the confounded variables, and show that this threshold decreases with sample size -- more data lowers the correlation required for the spurious edge to be favoured. Beyond this threshold, we characterize two distinct posterior failure regimes determined by the local structure around the confounded variables. Our findings are supported by exact posterior computations on multiple graph structures, demonstrating both the predicted failure regimes.
SVI-DAG is proposed, a structured variational inference approach to Bayesian causal discovery using observational data and prior beliefs that uses normalizing flows to model dependencies between edges, supporting expressive and multimodal posterior learning over DAGs.
This work considers the task of conditional causal discovery as a Bayesian inference problem, in which the posterior is targeted over causal graphs and parameters conditional on an event such as a causal-effect constraint, and adapts rare-event estimation techniques to perform inference the joint graph-parameter space.
Cixuan Zhang, Guy Van den Broeck, Benjie Wang· 0 citations
Recursive application of the law of total variance decomposes the marginal variance of an outcome into components attributed to explanatory variables and a residual component. The resulting decomposition depends on the chosen conditioning order, and its components do not in general have causal interpretations. We develop a graph-based framework for defining causal counterparts of ordered variance components and establishing their identification from observed data. Under topological orderings, identification can be assessed component by component against the full causal graph, without requiring the variables included in the decomposition to form a causally sufficient system. We also consider scientifically motivated departures from topological orderings, in which selected intermediate variables are conditioned on to obtain controlled-effect interpretations, motivated by the context of disparities in healthcare delivery. We relate the resulting estimands to causal attribution and variable-importance approaches in machine learning, and propose model-based plug-in estimators together with an approximate Bayesian procedure for uncertainty quantification. A simulation study examines finite-sample performance and sensitivity to outcome-model misspecification and flexible machine-learning estimation.
Causal Discovery (CD) from observational data faces two fundamental challenges. First, purely statistical methods often lack the power to resolve structural ambiguities in low-sample regimes. Second, although LLM-assisted hybrid approaches improve structure recovery through semantic reasoning, the influence of that reasoning on individual edge decisions remains largely opaque. Consequently, existing hybrid methods fail to satisfy a fundamental requirement: explaining why a particular edge is included or excluded in the learned directed acyclic graph (DAG). This is critical in real-world applications, where no ground-truth DAG exists and every structural decision must be independently justified. We formalize this requirement as decision traceability, requiring every inferred edge to be supported by auditable statistical evidence, Markov Blanket consistency, or explicit domain reasoning. We propose GENESIS, an explainable hybrid CD framework that decomposes graph construction into interpretable decision points. GENESIS first identifies and scores three-node structural motifs, including chains, forks, and colliders, to establish transparent structural priors, then progressively refines the graph by integrating these priors with observational evidence, invoking domain knowledge only when statistical evidence is insufficient. By design, every edge decision is resolved through an auditable source of evidence. Experiments show that GENESIS achieves 100% decision traceability across all settings, establishing explainability as a first-class objective in causal discovery. Despite this additional requirement, GENESIS consistently outperforms purely statistical CD methods on the majority of benchmark datasets across all sample regimes in terms of Structural Hamming Distance (SHD), while achieving performance comparable to state-of-the-art LLM-assisted approaches.
A. Thorat, Ravi Kolla, Vishak K Bhat et al.· 0 citations
This work proposes SURE-Ridge, a non-iterative, closed-form estimator for equal variance linear Gaussian SEM, which achieves the lowest structural Hamming distance in the small-sample regime and the lowest run time across all sample sizes tested, compared with NOTEARS, DAGMA, and GBNSL baselines.
Causal inference increasingly extends beyond classical causal effects defined by deterministic treatment assignments, such as the average treatment effect, to stochastic intervention effects that can weaken positivity requirements and offer greater policy relevance. Nonparametric Bayesian models are attractive for estimating these effects due to their flexibility and inherent uncertainty propagation, but this posterior uncertainty need not be well calibrated for the causal effect of interest. We develop a simple post-processing correction that can be applied to posterior samples without changing the prior or fitting algorithm. We prove that, for a broad class of stochastic interventions, the corrected posterior yields asymptotically efficient inference and credible intervals with asymptotically valid frequentist coverage; formally, it satisfies a semiparametric Bernstein-von Mises theorem. The theory covers interventions specified independently of the observed treatment process, as well as interventions that modify it, including incremental propensity score interventions and a new power-tilt intervention. A central contribution is new theory for SoftBART, including conditions under which this flexible tree-based Bayesian model supports calibrated Bayesian inference for stochastic intervention effects. In simulations, the correction reduces bias and improves coverage relative to the uncorrected Bayesian analysis while remaining competitive with frequentist alternatives. We illustrate the method by estimating how expected LDL cholesterol would change under hypothetical increases or decreases in the odds of receiving statin therapy.
Tyler Schmidt, Nathan B. Wikle· 0 citations
We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads.
See our Cookie Policy.
