The third pillar of causal analysis? A measurement perspective on causal representations

Kun Zhang (CMU & MBZUAI) · Francesco Locatello (ISTA) · Riccardo Cadei (Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)) · Dingling Yao (ISTA) · Shimeng Huang (Institute of Science and Technology Austria)

causal analysis causal discoverycausal downstream taskscausal inference scenarioscausal reasoning causal representation learningecological video analysislatent causal structureslearned representationsmeasurement model frameworknumerical simulationsproxy measurementsrepresentation quality assessmentt-mex scoretest-based measurement exclusivity

Causal reasoning and discovery, two fundamental tasks of causal analysis, often face challenges in applications due to the complexity, noisiness, and high-dimensionality of real-world data. Despite recent progress in identifying latent causal structures using causal representation learning (CRL), what makes learned representations useful for causal downstream tasks and how to evaluate them are still not well understood. In this paper, we reinterpret CRL using a measurement model framework, where the learned representations are viewed as proxy measurements of the latent causal variables. Our approach clarifies the conditions under which learned representations support downstream causal reasoning and provides a principled basis for quantitatively assessing the quality of representations using a new Test-based Measurement EXclusivity (T-MEX) score. We validate T-MEX across diverse causal inference scenarios, including numerical simulations and real-world ecological video analysis, demonstrating that the proposed framework and corresponding score effectively assess the identification of learned representations and their usefulness for causal downstream tasks.