Causal Deep Learning
It addresses the problem of unlocking causality's potential for practitioners in fields such as healthcare and economics, though it appears incremental by building on existing causal methods with a new framework.
The paper tackles the challenge of applying causality to real-world problems by proposing a causal deep learning framework that incorporates partial causal knowledge across structural, parametric, and temporal dimensions, enabling progress in domains like healthcare and economics by identifying testable assumptions.
Causality has the potential to truly transform the way we solve a large number of real-world problems. Yet, so far, its potential largely remains to be unlocked as causality often requires crucial assumptions which cannot be tested in practice. To address this challenge, we propose a new way of thinking about causality -- we call this causal deep learning. Our causal deep learning framework spans three dimensions: (1) a structural dimension, which incorporates partial yet testable causal knowledge rather than assuming either complete or no causal knowledge among the variables of interest; (2) a parametric dimension, which encompasses parametric forms that capture the type of relationships among the variables of interest; and (3) a temporal dimension, which captures exposure times or how the variables of interest interact (possibly causally) over time. Causal deep learning enables us to make progress on a variety of real-world problems by leveraging partial causal knowledge (including independencies among variables) and quantitatively characterising causal relationships among variables of interest (possibly over time). Our framework clearly identifies which assumptions are testable and which ones are not, such that the resulting solutions can be judiciously adopted in practice. Using our formulation we can combine or chain together causal representations to solve specific problems without losing track of which assumptions are required to build these solutions, pushing real-world impact in healthcare, economics and business, environmental sciences and education, through causal deep learning.