CausalArena is a new benchmark designed to evaluate causal discovery methods in the era of foundation models. It unifies synthetic structural causal models (SCMs), semantically grounded SCMs, and formula‑grounded SCMs, while also including real‑world datasets for external validation. Experiments show that performance rankings vary widely across different SCM families and protocols, indicating that strong results on one benchmark do not necessarily transfer to others.
By Zi-Rong Li, Si-Yang Liu, Tian-Zuo Wang, Han-Jia Ye
CausalArena is a unified, evolvable benchmark designed to evaluate causal discovery methods across diverse structural causal models (SCMs). It incorporates synthetic SCMs for controlled structural variation, semantic operational SCMs for human-auditable environments, and formula-grounded SCMs to test discovery under explicit scientific mechanisms, along with real-world datasets for external validity. Experiments show that performance rankings vary significantly across SCM families and protocols, indicating that strong results on one benchmark do not generalize to others, especially in the context of causal discovery foundation models.
The paper evaluates four main approaches to scalable nonlinear causal discovery—differentiable, amortized, score‑matching, and combinatorial search—highlighting their distinct accuracy‑runtime trade‑offs. It introduces SPADE, a spline‑based score‑evaluation method that compiles and reuses sufficient statistics, reducing combinatorial search complexity from O(nd³) to O(nd²+d³). Empirical results show SPADE dramatically extends the scalability‑accuracy frontier, solving large‑scale problems with high structural accuracy on both synthetic and real‑world data.
By Hendrik Suhr, Sascha Xu, Jilles Vreeken
arXiv:2607. 11508v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery, the process of recovering underlying causal structures from observational data, is a fundamental pursuit across scientific disciplines.
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arXiv:2609.06941v1 Announce Type: new
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By Haohao Zhou
arXiv:2607. 08093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act as integrated data-science agents, combining abstract reasoning with advanced tool use.
By Andrej Leban, Yuekai Sun
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By Xianjie Guo, Yuwei Wang, Guodu Xiang, Xiaoli Tang, Kui Yu, Han Yu, Qiang Yang
arXiv:2608. 02877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery recovers directed structure from observational data and is increasingly used in clinical settings to support mechanism reasoning and fairness audits of predictive models.
By Nitish Nagesh, Elahe Khatibi, Thomas Dean Hughes, Mahdi Bagheri, Pratik Gajane, Amir M. Rahmani
arXiv:2609.37446v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Supervised causal discovery learns to infer causal structure for a new dataset from training datasets paired with structural labels. These training pai...
By Pingchuan Ma, Rui Ding, Bojun Huang, Shuai Wang