PAG2ADMG: A Novel Methodology to Enumerate Causal Graph Structures

No. 1: Thirty-First AAAI Conference On Artificial Intelligence

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 31

Student Abstract Track

Causal graphs, such as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) and partial ancestral graphs (PAGs), represent causal relationships among variables in a model. Methods exist for learning DAGs and PAGs from data and for converting DAGs to PAGs. However, these methods only output a single causal graph consistent with the independencies/dependencies (the Markov equivalence class M) estimated from the data. However, many distinct graphs may be consistent with M, and a data modeler may wish to select among these using domain knowledge. In this paper, we present a method that makes this possible. We introduce PAG2ADMG, the first method for enumerating all causal graphs consistent with M, under certain assumptions. PAG2ADMG converts a given PAG into a set of acyclic directed mixed graphs (ADMGs). We prove the correctness of the approach and demonstrate its efficiency relative to brute-force enumeration.

10.1609/aaai.v31i1.11121