Title
Since Faithfulness Fails: The Performance Limits of Neural Causal Discovery
Authors
[ 1 ] Wydział Informatyki i Telekomunikacji, Politechnika Poznańska | [ 2 ] Instytut Informatyki, Wydział Informatyki i Telekomunikacji, Politechnika Poznańska | [ SzD ] doctoral school student | [ P ] employee
Scientific discipline (Law 2.0)
Year of publication
2025
Chapter type
chapter in monograph / paper
Publication language
english
Keywords
EN
- causal inference
- faithfulness
- causality
Abstract
EN Neural causal discovery methods have recently improved in terms of scalability and computational efficiency. However, our systematic evaluation highlights significant room for improvement in their accuracy when uncovering causal structures. We identify a fundamental limitation: unavoidable likelihood score estimation errors disallow distinguishing the true structure, even for small graphs and relatively large sample sizes. Furthermore, we identify the faithfulness property as a critical bottleneck: (i) it is likely to be violated across any reasonable dataset size range, and (ii) its violation directly undermines the performance of neural penalized-likelihood discovery methods. These findings lead us to conclude that progress within the current paradigm is fundamentally constrained, necessitating a paradigm shift in this domain.
License type
CC BY (attribution alone)
Open Access Mode
publisher's website
Open Access Text Version
final published version
Date of Open Access to the publication
at the time of publication
Ministry points / chapter
5
Ministry points / conference (CORE)
200
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