NeurIPS 2025poster0 citations

Faster Generic Identification in Tree-Shaped Structural Causal Models

Yasmine Briefs, Markus Bläser

Abstract

Linear structural causal models (SCMs) are used to analyze the relationships between random variables. Directed edges represent direct causal effects and bidirected edges represent hidden confounders. Generically identifying the causal parameters from observed correlations between the random variables is an open problem in causality. Gupta and Bl\"aser solve the case of SCMs in which the directed edges form a tree by giving a randomized polynomial time algorithm with running time $O(n^6)$. We present an improved algorithm with running time $O(n^3 \log^2 n)$ and demonstrate its feasibility by providing an implementation that outperforms existing state-of-the-art implementations.

causalitygeneric identificationstructural causal modelslinear structural equation models
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
briefs2025faster,
title={Faster Generic Identification in Tree-Shaped Structural Causal Models},
author={Yasmine Briefs and Markus Bl{\"a}ser},
booktitle={The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2025},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=8PHOPPH35D}
}