Bridging Causal Discovery and Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Integrative Approaches and Future Directions

Causal discovery (CD) and Large Language Models (LLMs) represent two emerging fields of study with significant implications for artificial intelligence. Despite their distinct origins, CD focuses on uncovering cause-effect relationships from data, and LLMs on processing and generating humanlike text, the convergence of these domains offers novel insights and methodologies for understanding complex systems. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the integration of LLMs, such as GPT4, into CD tasks. We systematically review and compare existing approaches that leverage LLMs for various CD tasks and highlight their innovative use of metadata and natural language to infer causal structures. Our analysis reveals the strengths and potential of LLMs in both enhancing traditional CD methods and as an imperfect expert, alongside the challenges and limitations inherent in current practices. Furthermore, we identify gaps in the literature and propose future research directions aimed at harnessing the full potential of LLMs in causality research. To our knowledge, this is the first survey to offer a unified and detailed examination of the synergy between LLMs and CD, setting the stage for future advancements in the field.

Proportional Multicalibration

Multicalibration is a desirable fairness criteria that constrains calibration error among flexibly-defined groups in the data while maintaining overall calibration. However, when outcome probabilities are correlated with group membership, multicalibrated models can exhibit a higher percent calibration error among groups with lower base rates than groups with higher base rates. As a result, it remains possible for a decision-maker to learn to trust or distrust model predictions for specific groups. To alleviate this, we propose proportional multicalibration, a criteria that constrains the percent calibration error among groups and within prediction bins. We prove that satisfying proportional multicalibration bounds a model's multicalibration as well its differential calibration, a stronger fairness criteria inspired by the fairness notion of sufficiency. We provide an efficient algorithm for post-processing risk prediction models for proportional multicalibration and evaluate it empirically. We conduct simulation studies and investigate a real-world application of PMC-postprocessing to prediction of emergency department patient admissions. We observe that proportional multicalibration is a promising criteria for controlling simultenous measures of calibration fairness of a model over intersectional groups with virtually no cost in terms of classification performance.