Incremental Causal Discovery and Visualization

Discovering causal relations from limited amounts of data can be useful for many applications. However, all causal discovery algorithms need huge amounts of data to estimate the underlying causal graph. To alleviate this gap, this paper proposes a novel visualization tool which incrementally discovers causal relations as more data becomes available. That is, we assume that stronger causal links will be detected quickly and weaker links revealed when enough data is available. In addition to causal links, the correlation between variables and the uncertainty of the strength of causal links are visualized in the same graph. The tool is illustrated on three example causal graphs, and results show that incremental discovery works and that the causal structure converges as more data becomes available.