Paths to Causality: Finding Informative Subgraphs Within Knowledge Graphs for Knowledge-Based Causal Discovery

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Susanti, Yuni, Färber, Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Susanti, Yuni
Färber, Michael
author_facet Susanti, Yuni
Färber, Michael
contents Inferring causal relationships between variable pairs is crucial for understanding multivariate interactions in complex systems. Knowledge-based causal discovery -- which involves inferring causal relationships by reasoning over the metadata of variables (e.g., names or textual context) -- offers a compelling alternative to traditional methods that rely on observational data. However, existing methods using Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce unstable and inconsistent results, compromising their reliability for causal inference. To address this, we introduce a novel approach that integrates Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with LLMs to enhance knowledge-based causal discovery. Our approach identifies informative metapath-based subgraphs within KGs and further refines the selection of these subgraphs using Learning-to-Rank-based models. The top-ranked subgraphs are then incorporated into zero-shot prompts, improving the effectiveness of LLMs in inferring the causal relationship. Extensive experiments on biomedical and open-domain datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms most baselines by up to 44.4 points in F1 scores, evaluated across diverse LLMs and KGs. Our code and datasets are available on GitHub: https://github.com/susantiyuni/path-to-causality
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_08771
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Paths to Causality: Finding Informative Subgraphs Within Knowledge Graphs for Knowledge-Based Causal Discovery
Susanti, Yuni
Färber, Michael
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Inferring causal relationships between variable pairs is crucial for understanding multivariate interactions in complex systems. Knowledge-based causal discovery -- which involves inferring causal relationships by reasoning over the metadata of variables (e.g., names or textual context) -- offers a compelling alternative to traditional methods that rely on observational data. However, existing methods using Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce unstable and inconsistent results, compromising their reliability for causal inference. To address this, we introduce a novel approach that integrates Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with LLMs to enhance knowledge-based causal discovery. Our approach identifies informative metapath-based subgraphs within KGs and further refines the selection of these subgraphs using Learning-to-Rank-based models. The top-ranked subgraphs are then incorporated into zero-shot prompts, improving the effectiveness of LLMs in inferring the causal relationship. Extensive experiments on biomedical and open-domain datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms most baselines by up to 44.4 points in F1 scores, evaluated across diverse LLMs and KGs. Our code and datasets are available on GitHub: https://github.com/susantiyuni/path-to-causality
title Paths to Causality: Finding Informative Subgraphs Within Knowledge Graphs for Knowledge-Based Causal Discovery
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08771