Causal discovery is a major task with the utmost importance for machine learning since causal structures can enable models to go beyond pure correlation-based inference and significantly boost their performance. However, finding causal structures from data poses a significant challenge both in computational effort and accuracy, let alone its impossibility without interventions in general. In this paper, we develop a meta-reinforcement learning algorithm that performs causal discovery by learning to perform interventions such that it can construct an explicit causal graph. Apart from being useful for possible downstream applications, the estimated causal graph also provides an explanation for the data-generating process. In this article, we show that our algorithm estimates a good graph compared to the SOTA approaches, even in environments whose underlying causal structure is previously unseen. Further, we make an ablation study that shows how learning interventions contribute to the overall performance of our approach. We conclude that interventions indeed help boost the performance, efficiently yielding an accurate estimate of the causal structure of a possibly unseen environment.

本文中提出了一种利用元强化学习算法，通过学习干预变量的方法来进行因果发现并构建明确的因果图的方法，研究表明与现有最先进的方法相比表现出的结果更好，揭示了这种干预策略对于该方法性能的贡献。

用于因果发现的元强化学习算法