Causal Preference Elicitation

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Authors: Edwin V. Bonilla, He Zhao, Daniel Steinberg
Cited by: 0

Abstract

We propose causal preference elicitation, a Bayesian framework for expert-in-the-loop causal discovery that actively queries local edge relations to concentrate a posterior over directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). From any black-box observational posterior, we model noisy expert judgments with a three-way likelihood over edge existence and direction. Posterior inference uses a flexible particle approximation, and queries are selected by an efficient expected information gain criterion on the expert's categorical response. Experiments on synthetic graphs, protein signaling data, and a human gene perturbation benchmark show faster posterior concentration and improved recovery of directed effects under tight query budgets.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Bayesian Modeling and Causal Inference Machine Learning and Algorithms Logic Reasoning and Knowledge

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
1 February 2026
Document type
Preprint