Towards Complete Causal Explanation with Expert Knowledge

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Abstract:We study the problem of restricting a Markov equivalence class of maximal ancestral graphs (MAGs) to only those MAGs that contain certain edge marks, which we refer to as expert knowledge. Such a restriction of the Markov equivalence class can be uniquely represented by a restricted essential ancestral graph. Our contributions are several-fold. First, we prove certain properties for the entire Markov equivalence class including a conjecture from Ali et al. (2009). Second, we present several new sound graphical orientation rules for adding expert knowledge to an essential ancestral graph. We also show that some orientation rules of Zhang (2008b) are not needed for restricting the Markov equivalence class with expert knowledge. Third, we provide an algorithm for including this expert knowledge and show that in certain settings the output of our algorithm is a restricted essential ancestral graph. Finally, outside of the specified settings, we provide an algorithm for checking whether a graph is a restricted essential graph and discuss its runtime. This work can be seen as a generalization of Meek (1995) to settings which allow for latent confounding.