Local Causal Discovery with Background Knowledge

Abstract

Causality plays a pivotal role in various fields of study. Based on the framework of causal graphical models, previous works have proposed identifying whether a variable is a cause or non-cause of a target in every Markov equivalent graph solely by learning a local structure. However, the presence of prior knowledge, often represented as a partially known causal graph, is common in many causal modeling applications. Leveraging this prior knowledge allows for the further identification of causal relationships. In this paper, we first propose a method for learning the local structure using all types of causal background knowledge, including direct causal information, non-ancestral information and ancestral information. Then we introduce criteria for identifying causal relationships based solely on the local structure in the presence of prior knowledge. We also apply out method to fair machine learning, and experiments involving local structure learning, causal relationship identification, and fair machine learning demonstrate that our method is both effective and efficient.