Stable Causal Discovery via Directed Acyclic Graph Aggregation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wu, Yunan, Wang, Yue, Li, Chunlin, Ye, Chenglong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Wu, Yunan
Wang, Yue
Li, Chunlin
Ye, Chenglong
author_facet Wu, Yunan
Wang, Yue
Li, Chunlin
Ye, Chenglong
contents Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) are central to uncovering causal structure in complex systems, yet learning a single DAG from data is often challenging: model uncertainty, finite samples, and a combinatorially large search space frequently yield unstable estimates. We propose DAGgr, a model averaging framework that aggregates multiple candidate DAGs into a single stable representation. Candidate graphs are weighted by their out-of-sample predictive likelihood across repeated data splits, and a thresholding rule on the resulting edge-importance scores guarantees that the aggregated graph is itself acyclic. We establish a finite-sample risk bound, prove that the procedure preserves acyclicity, and show that edge selection is consistent under mild conditions on the weights. Simulations across random, hub, and chain structures, together with an analysis of the Sachs et al. (2005) protein-signaling network, show that DAGgr matches or exceeds the best individual candidate while consistently outperforming bootstrap-aggregation baselines across structural recovery metrics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_18633
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stable Causal Discovery via Directed Acyclic Graph Aggregation
Wu, Yunan
Wang, Yue
Li, Chunlin
Ye, Chenglong
Methodology
Machine Learning
Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) are central to uncovering causal structure in complex systems, yet learning a single DAG from data is often challenging: model uncertainty, finite samples, and a combinatorially large search space frequently yield unstable estimates. We propose DAGgr, a model averaging framework that aggregates multiple candidate DAGs into a single stable representation. Candidate graphs are weighted by their out-of-sample predictive likelihood across repeated data splits, and a thresholding rule on the resulting edge-importance scores guarantees that the aggregated graph is itself acyclic. We establish a finite-sample risk bound, prove that the procedure preserves acyclicity, and show that edge selection is consistent under mild conditions on the weights. Simulations across random, hub, and chain structures, together with an analysis of the Sachs et al. (2005) protein-signaling network, show that DAGgr matches or exceeds the best individual candidate while consistently outperforming bootstrap-aggregation baselines across structural recovery metrics.
title Stable Causal Discovery via Directed Acyclic Graph Aggregation
topic Methodology
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18633