A Review of Some Recent Advances in Causal Inference

We give a selective review of some recent developments in causal inference, intended for researchers who are not familiar with graphical models and causality, and with a focus on methods that are applicable to large data sets. We mainly address the problem of estimating causal effects from observational data. For example, one can think of estimating the effect of single or multiple gene knockouts from wild-type gene expression data, that is, from gene expression measurements that were obtained without doing any gene knockout experiments. We assume that the observational data are generated from a causal structure that can be represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). First, we discuss estimation of causal effects when the underlying causal DAG is known. In large-scale networks, however, the causal DAG is often unknown. Next, we therefore discuss causal structure learning, that is, learning information about the causal structure from observational data. We then combine these two parts and discuss methods to estimate (bounds on) causal effects from observational data when the causal structure is unknown. We also illustrate this method on a yeast gene expression data set. We close by mentioning several extensions of the discussed work.