Federated causal discovery with missing data in a multicentric study on endometrial cancer

Objectives:

Establishing causal dependencies is crucial in applied domains, such as medicine and healthcare, where decision-making must be explainable. In these settings, small sample sizes and missing data call for federated approaches to maximise the amount of information we can use.

Methods:

We propose a novel federated causal discovery algorithm capable of pooling information from multiple sources with heterogeneous missing data to learn a graph representing cause–effect relationships. In particular, we learn a causal graph on a centralised server while taking into account both prior knowledge and missingness mechanism specific to each client.

Results:

We applied the proposed algorithm to synthetic data and real-world data from a multicentric study on endometrial cancer, validating the obtained causal graph through quantitative analyses and a clinical literature review.

Conclusion:

Our approach learns an accurate model despite data missing not-at-random.