Neural networks leverage both causal and correlation-based relationships in data to learn models that optimize a given performance criterion, such as classification accuracy. This results in learned models that may not necessarily reflect the true causal relationships between input and output. When domain priors of causal relationships are available at the time of training, it is essential that a neural network model maintains these relationships as causal, even as it learns to optimize the performance criterion. We propose a causal regularization method that can incorporate such causal domain priors into the network and which supports both direct and total causal effects. We show that this approach can generalize to various kinds of specifications of causal priors, including monotonicity of causal effect of a given input feature or removing a certain influence for purposes of fairness. Our experiments on eleven benchmark datasets show the usefulness of this approach in regularizing a learned neural network model to maintain desired causal effects. On most datasets, domain-prior consistent models can be obtained without compromising on accuracy.

本研究提出了一种正则化方法，通过领域知识中的先验知识来对齐神经网络的学习因果效应，包括直接和总因果效应，并在十二个基准数据集上进行实验和测试，表明该方法可实现神经网络模型的正则化，维护所需的因果效应而不牺牲准确性，而且在嘈杂的输入情况下还能提高模型准确性。

利用领域先验知识匹配神经网络的学习因果效应