Causal DAG Summarization

Summary: Proposes a causal DAG summarization objective that compresses large DAGs while preserving identification-relevant structure for valid adjustment. Gives an efficient greedy algorithm producing summary DAGs usable directly for inference and empirically more robust to misspecification than prior methods. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h29785e819fee81ec
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 5.2032182e-05
Overall Rank: 9,241 | 37.89%
DOI: 10.14778/3725688.3725717
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Anna Zeng (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2. Michael Cafarella (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
3. Batya Kenig (Technion)
4. Markos Markakis (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
5. Brit Youngmann (Technion)
6. Babak Salimi (University of California San Diego)

BibTeX Citation

@article{zeng_vldb25,
        title = {{Causal DAG Summarization}},
        author = {Zeng, Anna and Cafarella, Michael and Kenig, Batya and Markakis, Markos and Youngmann, Brit and Salimi, Babak},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '25},
        volume = {18},
        number = {6},
        pages = {1933--1947},
        doi = {10.14778/3725688.3725717},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3725688.3725717},
        year = {2025}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,465	Fair Data Pre-Processing with Imperfect Attribute Space	2026	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
10,636	Causal Explanations for Disparate Trends: Where and Why?	2026	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
11,150	CausaLens: A System for Summarizing Causal DAGs	2025	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 22 of 22 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
375	Graph Clustering Based on Structural/Attribute Similarities	2009	VLDB	0.00019619557
498	Efficient Aggregation for Graph Summarization	2008	SIGMOD	0.00017310055
563	Graph Summarization with Bounded Error	2008	SIGMOD	0.00016319495
671	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD	0.00014948069
804	Interventional Fairness : Causal Database Repair for Algorithmic Fairness	2019	SIGMOD	0.00013830311
1,375	Query Preserving Graph Compression	2012	SIGMOD	0.00010872356
1,983	Causality and Explanations in Databases	2014	VLDB	9.2548712e-05
2,318	Causal Relational Learning	2020	SIGMOD	8.6491185e-05
2,355	Bias in OLAP Queries: Detection, Explanation, and Removal (Or Think Twice About Your AVG-Query)	2018	SIGMOD	8.5862478e-05
2,720	TPC-DS, Taking Decision Support Benchmarking to the Next Level	2002	SIGMOD	8.0936194e-05
3,065	Explaining Black-Box Algorithms Using Probabilistic Contrastive Counterfactuals	2021	SIGMOD	7.6876494e-05
4,568	HYPER: Hypothetical Reasoning With What-If and How-To Queries Using a Probabilistic Causal Approach	2022	SIGMOD	6.5279657e-05
5,079	Efficient Graph Summarization using Weighted LSH at Billion-Scale	2021	SIGMOD	6.2831131e-05
5,661	Summarizing Static and Dynamic Big Graphs	2017	VLDB	6.0449991e-05
6,053	A Demonstration of Interactive Analysis of Performance Measurements with Viska	2017	SIGMOD	5.9001344e-05
6,186	Causal Data Integration	2023	VLDB	5.8559807e-05
6,438	Summarized Causal Explanations For Aggregate Views	2024	SIGMOD	5.7826256e-05
6,482	OTClean: Data Cleaning for Conditional Independence Violations using Optimal Transport	2024	SIGMOD	5.7690673e-05
6,568	Data-driven Visual Query Interfaces for Graphs: Past, Present, and (Near) Future	2022	SIGMOD	5.7443457e-05
6,703	Toward Interpretable and Actionable Data Analysis with Explanations and Causality	2022	VLDB	5.7031717e-05
6,877	Consistent Range Approximation for Fair Predictive Modeling	2023	VLDB	5.6564538e-05
10,214	From Logs to Causal Inference: Diagnosing Large Systems	2025	VLDB	5.0572653e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	10,699	Stress-Testing Causal Claims via Cardinality Repairs	2026	SIGMOD
2	1,654	Scalable Techniques for Mining Causal Structures	1998	VLDB
3	11,151	CausalExplain: Causal Explanations of Black-box Models with Training Data Subsets	2025	SIGMOD
4	11,152	CauSumX: Summarized Causal Explanations For Group-By-Average Queries	2025	SIGMOD
5	10,214	From Logs to Causal Inference: Diagnosing Large Systems	2025	VLDB
6	2,318	Causal Relational Learning	2020	SIGMOD
7	6,186	Causal Data Integration	2023	VLDB
8	11,352	What If: Causal Analysis with Graph Databases	2025	VLDB
9	6,438	Summarized Causal Explanations For Aggregate Views	2024	SIGMOD
10	11,150	CausaLens: A System for Summarizing Causal DAGs	2025	SIGMOD