Publication
Tagged for Direction: Pinning Down Causal Edge Directions with Precision
Florian Peter Busch; Moritz Willig; Florian Guldan; Kristian Kersting; Devendra Singh Dhami
In: Computing Research Repository eprint Journal (CoRR), Vol. abs/2506.19459, Pages 1-28, Computing Research Repository, 2025.
Abstract
Not every causal relation between variables is equal, and this can be leveraged
for the task of causal discovery. Recent research shows that pairs of variables
with particular type assignments induce a preference on the causal direction of
other pairs of variables with the same type. Although useful, this assignment of
a specific type to a variable can be tricky in practice. We propose a tag-based
causal discovery approach where multiple tags are assigned to each variable in
a causal graph. Existing causal discovery approaches are first applied to direct
some edges, which are then used to determine edge relations between tags. Then,
these edge relations are used to direct the undirected edges. Doing so improves
upon purely type-based relations, where the assumption of type consistency lacks
robustness and flexibility due to being restricted to single types for each variable.
Our experimental evaluations show that this boosts causal discovery and that these
high-level tag relations fit common knowledge.