Differentiable Constraint-Based Causal Discovery
Jincheng Zhou, Mengbo Wang, Anqi He, Yumeng Zhou, Hessam Olya, Murat Kocaoglu, Bruno Ribeiro
Causal discovery from observational data is a fundamental task in artificial intelligence, with far-reaching implications for decision-making, predictions, and interventions. Despite significant advances, existing methods can be broadly categorized as constraint-based or score-based approaches. Constraint-based methods offer rigorous causal discovery but are often hindered by small sample sizes, while gradient-based methods provide flexible optimization but typically forgo explicit conditional independence testing. This work explores a third avenue: develop differentiable $d$-separation scores, obtained through a percolation theory using soft logic. This enables the implementation of a new type of causal discovery method: gradient-based optimization of conditional independence constraints. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the robust performance of our approach in low-sample regimes, surpassing traditional constraint-based and score-based baselines on a real-world dataset.