Causal Discovery with Mixed Latent Confounding via Precision Decomposition

Abstract

We study causal discovery from observational data in linear Gaussian systems affected by \emph{mixed latent confounding}, where some unobserved factors act broadly across many variables while others influence only small subsets. This setting is common in practice and poses a challenge for existing methods: differentiable and score-based DAG learners can misinterpret global latent effects as causal edges, while latent-variable graphical models recover only undirected structure. We propose \textsc{DCL-DECOR}, a modular, precision-led pipeline that separates these roles. The method first isolates pervasive latent effects by decomposing the observed precision matrix into a structured component and a low-rank component. The structured component corresponds to the conditional distribution after accounting for pervasive confounders and retains only local dependence induced by the causal graph and localized confounding. A correlated-noise DAG learner is then applied to this deconfounded representation to recover directed edges while modeling remaining structured error correlations, followed by a simple reconciliation step to enforce bow-freeness. We provide identifiability results that characterize the recoverable causal target under mixed confounding and show how the overall problem reduces to well-studied subproblems with modular guarantees. Synthetic experiments that vary the strength and dimensionality of pervasive confounding demonstrate consistent improvements in directed edge recovery over applying correlated-noise DAG learning directly to the confounded data.