Papers › Causal Discovery over High-Dimensional Structured Hypothesis Spaces with Causal Graph...
Causal Discovery over High-Dimensional Structured Hypothesis Spaces with Causal Graph Partitioning
Ashka Shah, Adela DePavia, Nathaniel Hudson, Ian Foster, Rick Stevens
The aim in many sciences is to understand the mechanisms that underlie the observed distribution of variables, starting from a set of initial hypotheses. Causal discovery allows us to infer mechanisms as sets of cause and effect relationships in a generalized way -- without necessarily tailoring to a specific domain. Causal discovery algorithms search over a structured hypothesis space, defined by the set of directed acyclic graphs, to find the graph that best explains the data. For high-dimensional problems, however, this search becomes intractable and scalable algorithms for causal discovery are needed to bridge the gap. In this paper, we define a novel causal graph partition that allows for divide-and-conquer causal discovery with theoretical guarantees. We leverage the idea of a superstructure -- a set of learned or existing candidate hypotheses -- to partition the search space. We prove under certain assumptions that learning with a causal graph partition always yields the Markov Equivalence Class of the true causal graph. We show our algorithm achieves comparable accuracy and a faster time to solution for biologically-tuned synthetic networks and networks up to 10⁴ variables. This makes our method applicable to gene regulatory network inference and other domains with high-dimensional structured hypothesis spaces.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections