Bayesian Causal Induction

Discovering causal relationships is a hard task, often hindered by the need for intervention, and often requiring large amounts of data to resolve statistical uncertainty. However, humans quickly arrive at useful causal relationships. One possible reason is that humans use strong prior knowledge; and rather than encoding hard causal relationships, they encode beliefs over causal structures, allowing for sound generalization from the observations they obtain from directly acting in the world. In this work we propose a Bayesian approach to causal induction which allows modeling beliefs over multiple causal hypotheses and predicting the behavior of the world under causal interventions. We then illustrate how this method extracts causal information from data containing interventions and observations.