We consider the incorporation of causal knowledge about the presence or absence of (possibly indirect) causal relations into a causal model. Such causal relations correspond to directed paths in a causal model. This type of knowledge naturally arises from experimental data, among others. Specifically, we consider the formalisms of Causal Bayesian Networks and Maximal Ancestral Graphs and their Markov equivalence classes: Partially Directed Acyclic Graphs and Partially Oriented Ancestral Graphs. We introduce sound and complete procedures which are able to incorporate causal prior knowledge in such models. In simulated experiments, we show that often considering even a few causal facts leads to a significant number of new inferences. In a case study, we also show how to use real experimental data to infer causal knowledge and incorporate it into a real biological causal network. The code is available at mensxmachina.org.

本研究讨论将关于因果关系的先验知识纳入因果模型，并介绍了一些基于因果贝叶斯网络和最大祖宗图等模型的加入因果先验知识的方法和过程，通过模拟实验和案例研究发现，加入少量先验知识将导致大量新的推断结果。

将因果优先知识作为路径约束融入贝叶斯网络和最大祖先图