Online Causal Structure Learning in the Presence of Latent Variables

Abstract

We present two online causal structure learning algorithms which can track changes in a causal structure and process data in a dynamic real-time manner. Standard causal structure learning algorithms assume that causal structure does not change during the data collection process, but in real-world scenarios, it often does change. The algorithms proposed here can revise correlation values without reprocessing the entire dataset and use an existing model to avoid relearning the causal links in the prior model, which still fit data. Proposed algorithms are tested on synthetic datasets. The online causal structure learning algorithms outperformed standard FCI by a large margin in learning the changed causal structure correctly and efficiently when latent variables were present.