# The Randomized Causation Coefficient

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.4366 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4366/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2014.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Learning to Induce Causal Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04875/) (2022)
- [Causal Discovery from Temporal Data: An Overview and New Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10112/) (2023)
- [MECD: Unlocking Multi-Event Causal Discovery in Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17647/) (2024)
- [ML4C: Seeing Causality Through Latent Vicinity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00637/) (2021)
- [MECD+: Unlocking Event-Level Causal Graph Discovery for Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07227/) (2025)
- [Learning Identifiable Structures Helps Avoid Bias in DNN-based Supervised Causal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10883/) (2025)
- [Topological Residual Asymmetry for Bivariate Causal Direction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00427/) (2026)
- [Test-Time Learning of Causal Structure from Interventional Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19131/) (2026)
- [Graph Structure Inference with BAM: Introducing the Bilinear Attention Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07735/) (2024)
- [Causal Discovery via Transformed Low-Rank Quantile Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16931/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We are interested in learning causal relationships between pairs of random variables, purely from observational data. To effectively address this task, the state-of-the-art relies on strong assumptions regarding the mechanisms mapping causes to effects, such as invertibility or the existence of additive noise, which only hold in limited situations. On the contrary, this short paper proposes to learn how to perform causal inference directly from data, and without the need of feature engineering. In particular, we pose causality as a kernel mean embedding classification problem, where inputs are samples from arbitrary probability distributions on pairs of random variables, and labels are types of causal relationships. We validate the performance of our method on synthetic and real-world data against the state-of-the-art. Moreover, we submitted our algorithm to the ChaLearn's "Fast Causation Coefficient Challenge" competition, with which we won the fastest code prize and ranked third in the overall leaderboard.