Causal discovery has become a vital tool for scientists and practitioners wanting to discover causal relationships from observational data. While most previous approaches to causal discovery have implicitly assumed that no expert domain knowledge is available, practitioners can often provide such domain knowledge from prior experience. Recent work has incorporated domain knowledge into constraint-based causal discovery. The majority of such constraint-based methods, however, assume causal faithfulness, which has been shown to be frequently violated in practice. Consequently, there has been renewed attention towards exact-search score-based causal discovery methods, which do not assume causal faithfulness, such as A*-based methods. However, there has been no consideration of these methods in the context of domain knowledge. In this work, we focus on efficiently integrating several types of domain knowledge into A*-based causal discovery. In doing so, we discuss and explain how domain knowledge can reduce the graph search space and then provide an analysis of the potential computational gains. We support these findings with experiments on synthetic and real data, showing that even small amounts of domain knowledge can dramatically speed up A*-based causal discovery and improve its performance and practicality.

本篇论文探讨如何在基于A*方法的因果关系发现中高效地整合多种类型的专家领域知识以减少图形搜索空间，并提供了潜在的计算增益分析。作者通过合成数据和真实数据的实验支持这些发现，表明即使少量领域知识都可以极大地提高A*方法的效率和实用性。

A*算法因果发现中的领域知识