I-CAM-UV: Integrating Causal Graphs over Non-Identical Variable Sets Using Causal Additive Models with Unobserved Variables

TL;DR

This paper introduces I-CAM-UV, a method that integrates causal graphs from multiple datasets with non-identical variables using CAM-UV, effectively accounting for unobserved variables to improve causal discovery.

Contribution

The paper proposes I-CAM-UV, a novel approach that combines CAM-UV results across datasets with different variables, addressing unobserved confounders for more accurate causal graph estimation.

Findings

I-CAM-UV outperforms existing methods in causal discovery accuracy.

The combinatorial search algorithm efficiently identifies consistent causal graphs.

Experimental results validate the effectiveness of I-CAM-UV on multiple datasets.

Abstract

Causal discovery from observational data is a fundamental tool in various fields of science. While existing approaches are typically designed for a single dataset, we often need to handle multiple datasets with non-identical variable sets in practice. One straightforward approach is to estimate a causal graph from each dataset and construct a single causal graph by overlapping. However, this approach identifies limited causal relationships because unobserved variables in each dataset can be confounders, and some variable pairs may be unobserved in any dataset. To address this issue, we leverage Causal Additive Models with Unobserved Variables (CAM-UV) that provide causal graphs having information related to unobserved variables. We show that the ground truth causal graph has structural consistency with the information of CAM-UV on each dataset. As a result, we propose an approach named I-CAM-UV to integrate CAM-UV results by enumerating all consistent causal graphs. We also provide an efficient combinatorial search algorithm and demonstrate the usefulness of I-CAM-UV against existing methods.