Argumentative Causal Discovery
This work addresses the challenge of building scientific knowledge without randomized trials, offering a novel symbolic approach for researchers in causal inference, though it appears incremental as it combines existing formalisms.
The paper tackles the problem of causal discovery by integrating symbolic reasoning with causality theories, specifically using assumption-based argumentation (ABA) to learn causal graphs from data. It demonstrates that the method can retrieve ground-truth graphs under certain conditions and performs competitively against established baselines on four benchmark datasets.
Causal discovery amounts to unearthing causal relationships amongst features in data. It is a crucial companion to causal inference, necessary to build scientific knowledge without resorting to expensive or impossible randomised control trials. In this paper, we explore how reasoning with symbolic representations can support causal discovery. Specifically, we deploy assumption-based argumentation (ABA), a well-established and powerful knowledge representation formalism, in combination with causality theories, to learn graphs which reflect causal dependencies in the data. We prove that our method exhibits desirable properties, notably that, under natural conditions, it can retrieve ground-truth causal graphs. We also conduct experiments with an implementation of our method in answer set programming (ASP) on four datasets from standard benchmarks in causal discovery, showing that our method compares well against established baselines.