An open-source Python workflow that records each decision, derives defaults from an extended causal-audit module, and admits domain-informed overrides, AutoCause converts inconsistent expert practice into an auditable, repeatable analysis.
Abstract
Environmental time-series causal discovery requires expert decisions about method choice, conditional-independence tests, lag horizons, sample-size adequacy, multiple-testing control, and evidence interpretation. Applied inconsistently across datasets, these choices yield graphs that cannot be compared, reproduced, or audited. We present AutoCause, an open-source Python workflow that records each decision, derives defaults from an extended causal-audit module, and admits domain-informed overrides. The workflow wraps four established causal-discovery methods from three families, adds non-causal reference models, and grades links by method-count support. On 145 datasets from DGP-Atlas, TimeGraph, and a topology-derived CausalRivers reference, the methods recover complementary parts of the reference graphs. Majority-supported links are more precise than single-method links on the synthetic benchmarks but not against river topology. AutoCause converts inconsistent expert practice into an auditable, repeatable analysis; causal interpretation remains with the analyst. Available at https://github.com/marcoruizrueda/autocause.
Existing causal-inference benchmarks for LLMs mostly score method descriptions or whether generated code runs, not whether the executed workflow recovers the target causal estimate. CausalVerify studies this verification problem for structured econometric causal-estimation workflows by separating realistic interpretation from verifiable computation. It pairs 259 published economics papers (reconstructed research question, data description, institutional context) with 100 fixed-seed synthetic scenarios that realise CSV datasets for difference-in-differences, event study, instrumental variables, and regression discontinuity designs. Experiment A (real-paper text agreement) scores method-family and direction agreement against four-LLM consensus labels. Experiment B (synthetic execution) runs model-written R code and checks whether the extracted treatment-effect estimate matches a canonical estimator on the same realised dataset; this execution-grounded correctness layer is L2b+, distinct from L2b, which records only whether the code executes. A calibration arm asks whether self-reported confidence separates correct from incorrect workflows. On Experiment B, seven LLMs reach L2b+ pass rates of 10% to 88% at the default 50% tolerance, and 66 of the 426 workflows that execute (15.5%) return a wrong estimate. Execution ranking (L2b) agrees with L2b+ far better than text-direction scoring (L4): Kendall $\tau=0.81$ and Spearman $\rho=0.93$, versus Kendall $\tau$ between $-0.20$ and $0.10$ for L4. Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct shows the same qualitative gap, and reported confidence does not reliably separate correct from incorrect workflows. The claims are confined to standardized single-shot workflows in these four design families under the evaluated R backend and model panel; the benchmark does not measure general causal-inference ability. Code, data, cached outputs, and a datasheet are released.
Yong-Hong Zhang, Ricardo Correia, Isabel M. Parra et al.· 0 citations
Causal discovery aims to uncover causal structures from data and is fundamental to scientific reasoning and intervention-based decision making. Its evaluation relies heavily on structural causal models (SCMs), which specify a causal graph together with the mechanisms that generate data, yet existing studies differ substantially in graph families, mechanisms, and evaluation protocols. The emergence of causal discovery foundation models (CDFMs) further complicates evaluation: performance may reflect not only causal discovery ability, but also overlap between pretraining environments and test SCMs, making results on fixed synthetic benchmarks difficult to interpret. We introduce CausalArena, a unified and evolvable benchmark for causal discovery under a common protocol. Synthetic SCMs supply controlled breadth over structures and mechanisms; semantic operational SCMs provide human-auditable, semantically grounded environments beyond standard synthetic generators; and formula-grounded SCMs test discovery under explicit scientific mechanisms. Public real-world datasets provide an additional external-validity check. Experiments across classical, neural, and pretrained methods reveal substantial ranking shifts across SCM families and protocols, showing that strong performance in one benchmark regime does not reliably transfer to others. These results highlight benchmark diversity and pretraining--evaluation overlap as central challenges for evaluating causal discovery in the foundation model era.
Zi-Rong Li, Si-Zhuang Liu, Tian-Zuo Wang et al.· 0 citations
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
We describe Causal-TS, an open-source Python library for causal discovery in high-dimensional and nonstationary multivariate time series. Causal-TS provides four specialized algorithms-CDNOTS, CDNOTS+, CEDAR, and GRACE-along with wrappers for GES, Granger, LASSO-VAR, and LGES, all sharing a unified conditional independence (CI) test layer with GPU acceleration via PyTorch. A regime discovery pipeline detects structural breaks via pluggable changepoint detectors and runs discovery per regime with regime-specific parameters. A command-line interface, synthetic data generators, and optional DoWhy integration provide an end-to-end pipeline from raw time series to causal effect estimates. The library is pip-installable, tested on Python 3.10--3.12, and available at https://github.com/bloomberg/causal-ts.
In the world of modern analytics and machine learning, pipelines known as Extract-Load-Transform (ELT) pipelines are commonly used to transform raw data into representations that are suitable for models. But most of the existing ELT workflows are primarily correlation driven and don’t explicitly maintain causality during data transformation. This means that joins, filtering, aggregation and feature preparation steps can create confounding effects, selection bias, or false treatment-outcome relationship that can create unreliable AI-based decisions. This paper proposes such a causal intelligence enhanced ELT framework, where causal reasoning is integrated into the ELT process directly. Three pipeline-native components are proposed: causal graph-constrained data integration via Causal Join, covariate balancing and adjustment in-pipeline via Propensity Balance, and execution optimization via task scheduling and causal artifact reuse via Causal Scheduler. The proposed method is reduces bias earlier in the data lifecycle compared with purely post-hoc causal modelling less biased than post hoc causal modelling approaches as the transformation process itself is less biased. On experiments performed on the IHDP, Twins and Criteo uplift datasets, we have seen improved estimation of treatment effects, lower bias and higher predictive reliability. The proposed framework reduces the error in the estimation by approximately 55-65%, improves predictive accuracy from 82.0% to 91.0%, corresponding to a 9 percentage-point improvement. and gives a $7.5 \times$ speedup performance for GPU compared to CPU. These findings point towards the promise of causal intelligence in making more reliable and efficient decisions within ELT pipelines, potentially enhancing the overall reliability and trustworthiness of AI-driven decision systems in the field.
Nitesh Laxmanrao Khapekar, Divyakumar Deepak Savla, Naveen Kumar Mylarappa et al.· International Conference on...· 0 citations
Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) algorithms achieve high efficiency through interdependent phases across index construction and query execution. This coupling allows upstream performance loss to propagate downstream, affecting execution behavior and measurable outputs. Existing component-level analyses mainly compare isolated design choices, while end-to-end benchmarks report aggregate metrics; neither traces loss propagation across dependent phases, hindering root-cause attribution and automated redesign. We present SmartANN, a framework based on the object causal model (OCM) for ANN bottleneck attribution and automated redesign. SmartANN represents an ANN workflow as eight ordered, replaceable objects and diagnoses them with a sequential diagnose-and-replace loop. At each iteration, it identifies the first object deviating from expected behavior or output as a bottleneck. Because an upstream bottleneck can obscure downstream ones, SmartANN replaces it with a test oracle when available, or with an implementation producing a better outcome, then continues downstream diagnosis. From the diagnosed bottlenecks and failure causes, SmartANN composes compatible actions from a pluggable action library to generate an optimized end-to-end ANN design. We instantiate SmartANN for IVF-PQ and HNSW, covering partition-and-quantization and graph-based ANN families. Experiments on eight real-world datasets show that SmartANN improves Recall by 0.24--74.20%, and increases QPS by 28.8--256.5% at comparable Recall, with low diagnosis and auto-design overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/zhouyutong20/SmartANN.
Yu-Tong Zhou, Guoxin Kang, Lei Wang et al.· 0 citations
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