{"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/reliable-causal-discovery-with-improved-exact-1","title":"Reliable Causal Discovery with Improved Exact Search and Weaker Assumptions","arxiv_id":"2201.05666","date":"2022-01-14","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2021 12","authors":["Ignavier Ng","Yujia Zheng","Jiji Zhang","Kun Zhang"],"abstract":"Many of the causal discovery methods rely on the faithfulness assumption to guarantee asymptotic correctness. However, the assumption can be approximately violated in many ways, leading to sub-optimal solutions. Although there is a line of research in Bayesian network structure learning that focuses on weakening the assumption, such as exact search methods with well-defined score functions, they do not scale well to large graphs. In this work, we introduce several strategies to improve the scalability of exact score-based methods in the linear Gaussian setting. In particular, we develop a super-structure estimation method based on the support of inverse covariance matrix which requires assumptions that are strictly weaker than faithfulness, and apply it to restrict the search space of exact search. We also propose a local search strategy that performs exact search on the local clusters formed by each variable and its neighbors within two hops in the super-structure. Numerical experiments validate the efficacy of the proposed procedure, and demonstrate that it scales up to hundreds of nodes with a high accuracy.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.05666v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.05666v1.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":"reliable-causal-discovery-with-improved-exact-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/ignavierng/local-astar","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"causal-discovery","task_name":"Causal Discovery"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2201.05666","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2201.05666","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2201.05666"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/ignavierng/local-astar","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"fb4d9255a6f33654","entry":"dp_shortest_path","repo":"ignavierng/local-astar","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/search/exact_search.py","file_url":"https://github.com/ignavierng/local-astar/blob/HEAD/src/search/exact_search.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"fb4d9255a6f33654"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}