{"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/your-assumed-dag-is-wrong-and-here-s-how-to","title":"Your Assumed DAG is Wrong and Here's How To Deal With It","arxiv_id":"2502.17030","date":"2025-02-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kirtan Padh","Zhufeng Li","Cecilia Casolo","Niki Kilbertus"],"abstract":"Assuming a directed acyclic graph (DAG) that represents prior knowledge of causal relationships between variables is a common starting point for cause-effect estimation. Existing literature typically invokes hypothetical domain expert knowledge or causal discovery algorithms to justify this assumption. In practice, neither may propose a single DAG with high confidence. Domain experts are hesitant to rule out dependencies with certainty or have ongoing disputes about relationships; causal discovery often relies on untestable assumptions itself or only provides an equivalence class of DAGs and is commonly sensitive to hyperparameter and threshold choices. We propose an efficient, gradient-based optimization method that provides bounds for causal queries over a collection of causal graphs -- compatible with imperfect prior knowledge -- that may still be too large for exhaustive enumeration. Our bounds achieve good coverage and sharpness for causal queries such as average treatment effects in linear and non-linear synthetic settings as well as on real-world data. Our approach aims at providing an easy-to-use and widely applicable rebuttal to the valid critique of `What if your assumed DAG is wrong?'.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17030v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17030v1.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":"your-assumed-dag-is-wrong-and-here-s-how-to","repo_url":"https://github.com/zhufengli/your_dag_is_wrong","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"causal-discovery","task_name":"Causal Discovery"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"valid"}],"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}