Sitemap
Lina Faik

Lina Faik

Lead AI Scientist bringing AI research to real-world impact across industries. Independent consultant. Subscribe to: aipractitioner.substack.com

Member-only story

Score-Based Causal Discovery with LLMs

Practical Hands-on Techniques for Integrating LLMs Into Causal Discovery Pipelines

20 min readMay 21, 2026

--

Press enter or click to view image in full size

This article is also available as a podcast! If you’re on the go or just want to absorb the content in audio format, you can listen to the full episode below 👇 The podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Causal discovery tackles them by recovering a graph where nodes are variables and edges encode causal influence. The previous article introduced constraint-based methods, which infer this graph through conditional independence tests. They are statistically elegant, but sensitive in practice: errors in early tests propagate, and performance degrades quickly with noisy or high-dimensional data.

Score-based methods take a different approach. Instead of testing independences directly, they assign a score to candidate graphs and search for the structure that best explains the data. This makes them more flexible, more robust to noise, and easier to combine with prior knowledge.

--

--

Lina Faik
Lina Faik

Written by Lina Faik

Lead AI Scientist bringing AI research to real-world impact across industries. Independent consultant. Subscribe to: aipractitioner.substack.com