METHODS FOR MINING CAUSUSITY FROM OBSERVATIONS IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Abstract
The article discusses the importance of capturing causal relationships in machine learning
for decision-making and evaluating real-world impact. It is noted that most current successes in
machine learning are based on pattern recognition and correlation analysis; however, for more
complex tasks, extracting causal relationships is necessary. The problems of explainability of predictions
and causal understanding, even with the use of advanced machine learning techniques
such as LIME, SHAP, TreeSHAP, DeepSHAP, and Shapley Flow, are recognized as fundamental
obstacles in the development of artificial intelligence. The article briefly presents the main philosophical
and mathematical concepts and definitions of causality, including counterfactuals, Bayesian
networks, directed acyclic graphs, and causal formal inference. It concludes that the practical
significance of data-based causal analysis consists in answering a priori formulated questions,
which may reflect a hypothetical relationship between an event (a cause) and a second event (an
effect), where the second event is a direct consequence of the first. A comparative analysis of the
methods and main scenarios for using the Causal Discovery and Causal Inference frameworks is
also carried out. Based on this analysis, it becomes possible to make assumptions about the causal
structure underlying the investigated dataset and to use statistical methods to evaluate the strength
and direction of such relationships. The article also discusses methods and algorithms of causal
analysis and their application in real-world tasks. Representative methods are mentioned, such as
constraint-based models, estimation-based models, functional causal models, (conditional) independence
tests, evaluation functions, and other tools that can be used to solve the problem of extracting
causal relationships from observational data. Most of these methods are implemented in
open-source frameworks such as Microsoft DoWhy, Uber CausalML, causal-learn, Econ-ml, and
many others, which facilitate causal analysis.
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