MPCSL - A Modular Pipeline for Causal Structure Learning

Abstract

The examination of causal structures is crucial for data scientists in a variety of machine learning application scenarios. In recent years, the corresponding interest in methods of causal structure learning has led to a wide spectrum of independent implementations, each having specific accuracy characteristics and introducing implementation-specific overhead in the runtime. Hence, considering a selection of algorithms or different implementations in different programming languages utilizing different hardware setups becomes a tedious manual task with high setup costs. Consequently, a tool that enables to plug in existing methods from different libraries into a single system to compare and evaluate the results is substantial support for data scientists in their research efforts. In this work, we propose an architectural blueprint of a pipeline for causal structure learning and outline our reference implementation MPCSL that addresses the requirements towards platform independence and modularity while ensuring the comparability and reproducibility of experiments. Moreover, we demonstrate the capabilities of MPCSL within a case study, where we evaluate existing implementations of the well-known PC-Algorithm concerning their runtime performance characteristics.