Incorporating Expert Knowledge into Bayesian Causal Discovery of Mixtures of Directed Acyclic Graphs

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Björkman, Zachris, Loría, Jorge, Wharrie, Sophie, Kaski, Samuel
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Björkman, Zachris
Loría, Jorge
Wharrie, Sophie
Kaski, Samuel
author_facet Björkman, Zachris
Loría, Jorge
Wharrie, Sophie
Kaski, Samuel
contents Bayesian causal discovery benefits from prior information elicited from domain experts, and in heterogeneous domains any prior knowledge would be badly needed. However, so far prior elicitation approaches have assumed a single causal graph and hence are not suited to heterogeneous domains. We propose a causal elicitation strategy for heterogeneous settings, based on Bayesian experimental design (BED) principles, and a variational mixture structure learning (VaMSL) method -- extending the earlier differentiable Bayesian structure learning (DiBS) method -- to iteratively infer mixtures of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs). We construct an informative graph prior incorporating elicited expert feedback in the inference of mixtures of CBNs. Our proposed method successfully produces a set of alternative causal models (mixture components or clusters), and achieves an improved structure learning performance on heterogeneous synthetic data when informed by a simulated expert. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach is capable of capturing complex distributions in a breast cancer database.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_06735
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Incorporating Expert Knowledge into Bayesian Causal Discovery of Mixtures of Directed Acyclic Graphs
Björkman, Zachris
Loría, Jorge
Wharrie, Sophie
Kaski, Samuel
Machine Learning
Methodology
Bayesian causal discovery benefits from prior information elicited from domain experts, and in heterogeneous domains any prior knowledge would be badly needed. However, so far prior elicitation approaches have assumed a single causal graph and hence are not suited to heterogeneous domains. We propose a causal elicitation strategy for heterogeneous settings, based on Bayesian experimental design (BED) principles, and a variational mixture structure learning (VaMSL) method -- extending the earlier differentiable Bayesian structure learning (DiBS) method -- to iteratively infer mixtures of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs). We construct an informative graph prior incorporating elicited expert feedback in the inference of mixtures of CBNs. Our proposed method successfully produces a set of alternative causal models (mixture components or clusters), and achieves an improved structure learning performance on heterogeneous synthetic data when informed by a simulated expert. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach is capable of capturing complex distributions in a breast cancer database.
title Incorporating Expert Knowledge into Bayesian Causal Discovery of Mixtures of Directed Acyclic Graphs
topic Machine Learning
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06735