Causal Discovery Under Hard Selection Bias: A New Robust Score-Matching Approach

Abstract:Selection bias is a difficult yet widespread problem in causal discovery, occurring whenever non-random selection processes lead to data that is not representative of the underlying populations. Due to its practical importance, related works have been proposed to address the problem under local [Versteeg et al., 2022] or interventional settings [Dai et al., 2025a], but general algorithms for observational data remain elusive. In this paper, we focus on truncated data (hard selection), and provide a general result for Additive Noise Models (ANM). We show that score-based methods are a surprisingly suitable candidate due to a special property of the score function ($\nabla \log p(x)$): deterministic truncation preserves both the score of the joint distribution as well as the Jacobian of the score. While established score-matching algorithms still fail in most settings, we actively leverage this observation to propose a new method for causal discovery that is robust under truncated data with ANMs. Overall, our approach offers a general, robust solution that is agnostic to external information about the selection process and still achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art approaches when selection is not present.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.18075 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.18075v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.18075 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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