Multi-task Causal Learning with Gaussian Processes

Neural Information Processing Systems 

This paper studies the problem of learning the correlation structure of a set of intervention functions defined on the directed acyclic graph (DAG) of a causal model. This is useful when we are interested in jointly learning the causal effects of interventions on different subsets of variables in a DAG, which is common in field such as healthcare or operations research. We propose the first multi-task causal Gaussian process (GP) model, which we call DAG-GP, that allows for information sharing across continuous interventions and across experiments on different variables. We give theoretical results detailing when and how the DAG-GP model can be formulated depending on the DAG. We test both the quality of its predictions and its calibrated uncertainties.