A Semi-Analytical Inference Framework for Structural Causal Models

2026-10-21 · ArXiv

arXiv:2610.28103v1 Announce Type: new

Abstract: Structural Causal Models (SCMs) provide a principled framework for observational, interventional, and counterfactual reasoning, all of which rely on probabilistic inference. Existing frameworks either transform SCMs into alternative tractable representations or rely on approximate inference with expressive generative models. We instead perform inference using a message passing scheme directly on the SCM by representing structural mechanisms and probability densities in a common finite-dimensional function space. Forward propagation combines a numerical realization of the Law of the Unconscious Statistician, while propagated densities are recovered by spline projection from LOTUS moments. The same representation naturally yields backward message passing for conditioning, providing a unified framework for causal inference. Using tensor-product B-spline bases, the resulting algorithm expresses inference through numerical quadrature and linear algebra without explicitly constructing conditional distributions. Experiments on randomly generated continuous SCMs demonstrate accurate approximation of Monte Carlo reference solutions and systematic improvement with increasing basis resolution.

原文链接:https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28103

查看更多资讯请见 AI 行业资讯。