ASP-based Discovery of Semi-Markovian Causal Models under Weaker Assumptions
This work addresses a key limitation in causal inference for more realistic settings with hidden variables, though it appears incremental as it extends prior results to a broader context.
The paper tackles the problem of automated causal discovery by relaxing the Faithfulness assumption for semi-Markovian causal models with latent variables, showing that this weakening preserves its power and speeds up Answer Set Programming-based methods.
In recent years the possibility of relaxing the so-called Faithfulness assumption in automated causal discovery has been investigated. The investigation showed (1) that the Faithfulness assumption can be weakened in various ways that in an important sense preserve its power, and (2) that weakening of Faithfulness may help to speed up methods based on Answer Set Programming. However, this line of work has so far only considered the discovery of causal models without latent variables. In this paper, we study weakenings of Faithfulness for constraint-based discovery of semi-Markovian causal models, which accommodate the possibility of latent variables, and show that both (1) and (2) remain the case in this more realistic setting.