Learning the causal structure of observable variables is a central focus for scientific discovery. Bayesian causal discovery methods tackle this problem by learning a posterior over the set of admissible graphs given our priors and observations. Existing methods primarily consider observations from static systems and assume the underlying causal structure takes the form of a directed acyclic graph (DAG). In settings with dynamic feedback mechanisms that regulate the trajectories of individual variables, this acyclicity assumption fails unless we account for time. We focus on learning Bayesian posteriors over cyclic graphs and treat causal discovery as a problem of sparse identification of a dynamical system. This imposes a natural temporal causal order between variables and captures cyclic feedback loops through time. Under this lens, we propose a new framework for Bayesian causal discovery for dynamical systems and present a novel generative flow network architecture (DynGFN) tailored for this task. Our results indicate that DynGFN learns posteriors that better encapsulate the distributions over admissible cyclic causal structures compared to counterpart state-of-the-art approaches.

本文提出了一个针对动态系统的基于Bayesian原理的因果关系发现框架，采用生成流网络架构来学习循环图的贝叶斯后验概率，该框架通过时间建立自然的因果关系，并通过实验表明其与同类算法相比，能够更好的表征同时具有循环性和因果性的问题。

DynGFN：使用生成流网络的贝叶斯动态因果发现