CausalNex, a toolkit for causal reasoning

07 Apr 2020

CausalNex is a library developped by QuantumBlack to facilitate the causal analysis of a dataset. At its root, CausalNex relies on Bayesian Networks.
For more on Bayesian Networks, have a look at Wikipedia and a tutorial by Kevin Murphy. The training of these Bayesian Networks (causal inference) uses the algorithm introduced in the paper DAGs with NO TEARS.

Installation

The documentation is pretty clear. The library can be easily installed by doing pip install causalnex. Note that for some reason (not clear to me), we can’t install via poetry. Also, causalnex requires pandas=0.24.0, which seems to be a problem with the current project.

Last, but not least, causalnex requires the library pygraphviz which has to be installed separately. And of course, pip install pygraphviz returns an error. I ended up having to install everything but causalnex via conda the pip install causalnex. But this may not be convenient for everyone, and it’s weird that the library is so finicky.

Tutorial

The documentation contains (for now) a single tutorial that I will go through. The first thing we need to do is download the dataset, and unzip it.

[ causality  python  ]