{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/on-the-role-of-priors-in-bayesian-causal","title":"On the Role of Priors in Bayesian Causal Learning","arxiv_id":"2504.01424","date":"2025-04-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Bernhard C. Geiger","Roman Kern"],"abstract":"In this work, we investigate causal learning of independent causal mechanisms from a Bayesian perspective. Confirming previous claims from the literature, we show in a didactically accessible manner that unlabeled data (i.e., cause realizations) do not improve the estimation of the parameters defining the mechanism. Furthermore, we observe the importance of choosing an appropriate prior for the cause and mechanism parameters, respectively. Specifically, we show that a factorized prior results in a factorized posterior, which resonates with Janzing and Sch\\\"olkopf's definition of independent causal mechanisms via the Kolmogorov complexity of the involved distributions and with the concept of parameter independence of Heckerman et al.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01424v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.01424v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"on-the-role-of-priors-in-bayesian-causal","repo_url":"https://github.com/KNOWSKITE-X/BayesianCausalLearning","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}