ECCS: Exposing Critical Causal Structures

Welcome to the repository for the ECCS project! You can access the documentation here.

For technical details about the project, you can read our paper.

Table of Contents

1. Setting up a virtual environment and installing dependencies.

2. Reproducing our evaluation

3. Rebuilding the documentation

1. Setting up a virtual environment and installing dependencies

Using a virtual environment is recommended to ensure dependencies are managed correctly. This section will walk you through setting up a virtual environment for this project. Before starting, make sure you have:

• Python 3 installed on your system
• Access to the command line/terminal

1.1. Creating the Virtual Environment

First, navigate to the project's root directory in your terminal. Then, create a virtual environment by running:

python3 -m venv eccs-venv

This command creates a new directory eccs-venv in your project where the virtual environment files are stored.

1.2. Activating the Virtual Environment

To activate the virtual environment, use the following command:

On Windows:

.\eccs-venv\Scripts\activate

On macOS and Linux:

source eccs-venv/bin/activate

After activation, your terminal prompt will change to indicate that the virtual environment is active.

1.3. Installing Dependencies

With the virtual environment active, install the project dependencies by running:

pip install -r requirements.txt

1.4. Deactivating the Virtual Environment

When you're done working in the virtual environment, you can deactivate it by running:

deactivate

This command will return you to your system's default Python interpreter.

2. Reproducing our evaluation

Reproducing our evaluation is super easy! Just run the following command from the root of this repository (within the virtual environment you created above):

python3 src/evaluation/iterative_runner.py

An experimental directory will be created under evaluation/, named after the current timestamp <ts>. After the experimental run completes, you will be able to find plots like the ones included in Figure 2 of our paper under evaluation/<ts>/plots/. Note that each experimental run creates new ground truth causal graphs, datasets, and starting causal graphs, so your plots may vary from the results in the paper.

You can edit src/evaluation/iterative_config.yml to adjust any experimental parameters.

NOTE: Running all of the experiments in our evaluation can take several hours, depending on your hardware. You may want to use a tool like tmux to run the above command in the background.

3. Rebuilding the documentation

To rebuild the documentation after editing the code, you can run:

mkdocs gh-deploy