Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional abilities for causal analysis between concepts in numerous societally impactful domains, including medicine, science, and law. Recent research on LLM performance in various causal discovery and inference tasks has given rise to a new ladder in the classical three-stage framework of causality. In this paper, we advance the current research of LLM-driven causal discovery by proposing a novel framework that combines knowledge-based LLM causal analysis with data-driven causal structure learning. To make LLM more than a query tool and to leverage its power in discovering natural and new laws of causality, we integrate the valuable LLM expertise on existing causal mechanisms into statistical analysis of objective data to build a novel and practical baseline for causal structure learning. We introduce a universal set of prompts designed to extract causal graphs from given variables and assess the influence of LLM prior causality on recovering causal structures from data. We demonstrate the significant enhancement of LLM expertise on the quality of recovered causal structures from data, while also identifying critical challenges and issues, along with potential approaches to address them. As a pioneering study, this paper aims to emphasize the new frontier that LLMs are opening for classical causal discovery and inference, and to encourage the widespread adoption of LLM capabilities in data-driven causal analysis.

本文提出了一种结合基于知识的LLMs因果分析和数据驱动因果结构学习的新框架，以构建因果结构学习的新范式，并介绍了一套广泛的提示组，以从给定变量中提取因果图，并评估LLM先前因果对从数据中恢复因果结构的影响

从查询工具到因果架构：利用大型语言模型从数据中进行先进的因果发现