Sources of causal graphs in the real world
We have discussed graphs from several perspectives now, yet we haven’t tackled an important practical question: what is the source of causal graphs in the real world?
In this section, we’ll provide a brief overview of such sources and we’ll leave a more detailed discussion for Part 3 of the book.
On a high level, we can group the ways of obtaining causal graphs into three classes:
- Causal discovery
- Expert knowledge
- A combination of both
Let’s discuss them briefly.
Causal discovery
Causal discovery and causal structure learning are umbrella terms for various kinds of methods used to uncover causal structure from observational or interventional data. We devote the entirety of Part 3 of this book to this topic.
Expert knowledge
Expert knowledge is a term covering various types of knowledge that can help define or disambiguate causal relations between two or more variables. Depending...
