From Observational Studies to Causal Rule Mining

Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are the most effective approach to causal discovery, but in many circumstances it is impossible to conduct RCTs. Therefore, observational studies based on passively observed data are widely accepted as an alternative to RCTs. However, in observational studies, prior knowledge is required to generate the hypotheses about the cause-effect relationships to be tested, and hence they can only be applied to problems with available domain knowledge and a handful of variables. In practice, many datasets are of high dimensionality, which leaves observational studies out of the opportunities for causal discovery from such a wealth of data sources. In another direction, many efficient data mining methods have been developed to identify associations among variables in large datasets. The problem is that causal relationships imply associations, but the reverse is not always true. However, we can see the synergy between the two paradigms here. Specifically, association rule mining can be used to deal with the high-dimensionality problem, whereas observational studies can be utilised to eliminate noncausal associations. In this article, we propose the concept of causal rules (CRs) and develop an algorithm for mining CRs in large datasets. We use the idea of retrospective cohort studies to detect CRs based on the results of association rule mining. Experiments with both synthetic and real-world datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of CR mining. In comparison with the commonly used causal discovery methods, the proposed approach generally is faster and has better or competitive performance in finding correct or sensible causes. It is also capable of finding a cause consisting of multiple variables—a feature that other causal discovery methods do not possess.