arXiv Machine Learning

Beyond Distributional Fidelity: Causal-Penalized Diffusion for Synthetic Tabular Data

The paper introduces a causal‑penalized diffusion model for generating synthetic tabular data, arguing that high statistical fidelity does not guarantee accurate causal inference. It defines causal fidelity as the discrepancy between inferential distributions from real and synthetic data and proposes a training framework that adds a causal discrepancy penalty to the generative objective. Experiments on treatment‑effect simulations and benchmark datasets demonstrate that the method can improve causal fidelity while maintaining competitive statistical fidelity.

arXiv AI
Jun 30

Causality for Tabular Data Synthesis: A High-Order Structure Causal Benchmark Framework

arXiv:2406. 08311v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing evaluations of tabular synthesis models rely primarily on low-order statistics and downstream task performance, leaving multivariate causal relationships that go beyond pairwise correlations largely unmeasured.

By Zineb Senane, Axel Karlsson, Lele Cao, Oleg Smirnov, Cheng Zhang, Sahar Asadi, Hedvig Kjellstr\"om, Gustav Eje Henter, Ruibo Tu
arXiv AI
Aug 20

CausalProfiler: Generating Synthetic Benchmarks for Rigorous and Transparent Evaluation of Causal Machine Learning

CausalProfiler is a synthetic benchmark generator designed to evaluate causal machine learning (Causal ML) methods more rigorously and transparently. It randomly samples causal models, data, queries, and ground truths based on explicit design choices across observation, intervention, and counterfactual reasoning levels, providing coverage guarantees and transparent assumptions. The authors demonstrate its utility by testing several state‑of‑the‑art methods under diverse conditions, both within and outside the identification regime, highlighting the insights CausalProfiler can reveal.

By Panayiotis Panayiotou, Audrey Poinsot, Alessandro Leite, Nicolas Chesneau, Marc Schoenauer, \"Ozg\"ur \c{S}im\c{s}ek
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Distributional Causal Mediation via Conditional Generative Modeling

arXiv:2605. 01765v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mediation analysis has traditionally focused on outcome-level summary contrasts, such as mean effects, which may obscure substantial distributional changes induced by complex and nonlinear causal mechanisms.

By Jinlun Zhang, Haoneng Huang, Zishu Zhan, Chunquan Ou
arXiv Statistics ML
Sep 28

Identifying Causal Effects Using a Single Proxy Variable

The paper tackles the problem of estimating causal effects when an unobserved confounder is present. It assumes a single, possibly multi‑dimensional proxy variable for the confounder and knowledge of the mechanism that generates this proxy. Under the Single Proxy Identifiability of Causal Effects (SPICE) assumption, the authors prove that the error mechanism is complete and causal effects are identifiable, extending prior proxy‑based results to continuous, multi‑dimensional settings and more flexible functional forms. They also introduce SPICE‑Net, a neural‑network‑based framework for estimating causal effects applicable to both discrete and continuous treatments.

By Silvan Vollmer, Niklas Pfister, Sebastian Weichwald
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

TabCausal: Pretraining Across Causal Environments for Tabular Causal Discovery

TabCausal is a causal discovery foundation model that learns to map datasets directly to causal graphs by pretraining across diverse causal environments. It uses a dynamic task construction strategy to expose the model to varied graph priors, mechanisms, noise models, dimensions, sample sizes, and intervention regimes, improving transferability from observational and mixed‑interventional data. On large synthetic benchmarks and a new protocol‑guided semantic benchmark, TabCausal outperforms many classical baselines and shows robust structure recovery, especially when interventional evidence is available.

By Zi-Rong Li, Si-Yang Liu, Tian-Zuo Wang, Han-Jia Ye