Graph Dirichlet Energy for Fitting-Free Bivariate Causal Inference

Abstract

We propose the Graph Dirichlet Energy Causal Inference (GDECI) criterion for distinguishing cause from effect in bivariate settings. For a candidate direction $X\to Y$, we construct a kernel similarity graph from $X$ and treat $Y$ as a graph signal. The score is the Dirichlet energy of this signal, induced by the unnormalized graph Laplacian. The reverse score swaps the variables, and the lower-energy direction is inferred as causal. The method requires neither regression fitting nor independence testing. After the empirical probability integral transform, its decisions are invariant under strictly monotone transformations of either variable, and the graph operations reduce to convolutions, allowing exact evaluation in $O(n\log n)$ time and $O(n)$ memory. At the population level, GDECI compares degree-weighted Bayes squared prediction errors plus a non-negative smoothness term of the regression function. As the bandwidth tends to zero, the weights become uniform and the smoothness term vanishes, reducing the criterion to a RECI-type comparison of expected conditional variances in copula space. Empirically, we compare GDECI with QCCD, GRCI, CAM, IGCI (two variants), RESIT, LOCI, QPE-k, and RECI (two variants), in accuracy on 1899 cause--effect pairs and in inference speed. GDECI ranked fifth of eleven methods in macro-averaged accuracy on 12 synthetic suites ($0.776$). On the real-world Tuebingen pairs, it ranked third in unweighted accuracy ($0.684$) and fifth in weighted accuracy ($0.678$). It was also the fastest of the compared methods up to $n\approx10^{4}$. The accompanying code repository: https://github.com/povidanius/gdeci.