Dataset Information

CausalTrail: Testing hypothesis using causal Bayesian networks.

ABSTRACT: Summary Causal Bayesian Networks are a special class of Bayesian networks in which the hierarchy directly encodes the causal relationships between the variables. This allows to compute the effect of interventions, which are external changes to the system, caused by e.g. gene knockouts or an administered drug. Whereas numerous packages for constructing causal Bayesian networks are available, hardly any program targeted at downstream analysis exists. In this paper we present CausalTrail, a tool for performing reasoning on causal Bayesian networks using the do-calculus. CausalTrail's features include multiple data import methods, a flexible query language for formulating hypotheses, as well as an intuitive graphical user interface. The program is able to account for missing data and thus can be readily applied in multi-omics settings where it is common that not all measurements are performed for all samples. Availability and Implementation CausalTrail is implemented in C++ using the Boost and Qt5 libraries. It can be obtained from https://github.com/dstoeckel/causaltrail.

SUBMITTER: Stockel D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4743151 | biostudies-other | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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CausalTrail: Testing hypothesis using causal Bayesian networks.

Stöckel Daniel D Schmidt Florian F Trampert Patrick P Lenhof Hans-Peter HP

F1000Research 20151230

Summary Causal Bayesian Networks are a special class of Bayesian networks in which the hierarchy directly encodes the causal relationships between the variables. This allows to compute the effect of interventions, which are external changes to the system, caused by e.g. gene knockouts or an administered drug. Whereas numerous packages for constructing causal Bayesian networks are available, hardly any program targeted at downstream analysis exists. In this paper we present CausalTrail, a tool fo ...[more]

PMID: 26913195

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Project description:BackgroundThe combination of genotypic and genome-wide expression data arising from segregating populations offers an unprecedented opportunity to model and dissect complex phenotypes. The immense potential offered by these data derives from the fact that genotypic variation is the sole source of perturbation and can therefore be used to reconcile changes in gene expression programs with the parental genotypes. To date, several methodologies have been developed for modeling eQTL data. These methods generally leverage genotypic data to resolve causal relationships among gene pairs implicated as associates in the expression data. In particular, leading studies have augmented Bayesian networks with genotypic data, providing a powerful framework for learning and modeling causal relationships. While these initial efforts have provided promising results, one major drawback associated with these methods is that they are generally limited to resolving causal orderings for transcripts most proximal to the genomic loci. In this manuscript, we present a probabilistic method capable of learning the causal relationships between transcripts at all levels in the network. We use the information provided by our method as a prior for Bayesian network structure learning, resulting in enhanced performance for gene network reconstruction.ResultsUsing established protocols to synthesize eQTL networks and corresponding data, we show that our method achieves improved performance over existing leading methods. For the goal of gene network reconstruction, our method achieves improvements in recall ranging from 20% to 90% across a broad range of precision levels and for datasets of varying sample sizes. Additionally, we show that the learned networks can be utilized for expression quantitative trait loci mapping, resulting in upwards of 10-fold increases in recall over traditional univariate mapping.ConclusionsUsing the information from our method as a prior for Bayesian network structure learning yields large improvements in accuracy for the tasks of gene network reconstruction and expression quantitative trait loci mapping. In particular, our method is effective for establishing causal relationships between transcripts located both proximally and distally from genomic loci.

Project description:Developing data-driven solutions that address real-world problems requires understanding of these problems' causes and how their interaction affects the outcome-often with only observational data. Causal Bayesian Networks (BN) have been proposed as a powerful method for discovering and representing the causal relationships from observational data as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). BNs could be especially useful for research in global health in Lower and Middle Income Countries, where there is an increasing abundance of observational data that could be harnessed for policy making, program evaluation, and intervention design. However, BNs have not been widely adopted by global health professionals, and in real-world applications, confidence in the results of BNs generally remains inadequate. This is partially due to the inability to validate against some ground truth, as the true DAG is not available. This is especially problematic if a learned DAG conflicts with pre-existing domain doctrine. Here we conceptualize and demonstrate an idea of a "Causal Datasheet" that could approximate and document BN performance expectations for a given dataset, aiming to provide confidence and sample size requirements to practitioners. To generate results for such a Causal Datasheet, a tool was developed which can generate synthetic Bayesian networks and their associated synthetic datasets to mimic real-world datasets. The results given by well-known structure learning algorithms and a novel implementation of the OrderMCMC method using the Quotient Normalized Maximum Likelihood score were recorded. These results were used to populate the Causal Datasheet, and recommendations could be made dependent on whether expected performance met user-defined thresholds. We present our experience in the creation of Causal Datasheets to aid analysis decisions at different stages of the research process. First, one was deployed to help determine the appropriate sample size of a planned study of sexual and reproductive health in Madhya Pradesh, India. Second, a datasheet was created to estimate the performance of an existing maternal health survey we conducted in Uttar Pradesh, India. Third, we validated generated performance estimates and investigated current limitations on the well-known ALARM dataset. Our experience demonstrates the utility of the Causal Datasheet, which can help global health practitioners gain more confidence when applying BNs.

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CausalTrail: Testing hypothesis using causal Bayesian networks.

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CausalTrail: Testing hypothesis using causal Bayesian networks.

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