CausalGrade: Evidence-Guided Causal Graph Scoring with Jev

Abstract

Evaluating the structural quality of candidate causal graphs when the true causal structure is unknown is an important problem in applying causal discovery results. This paper proposes CausalGrade, a causal graph scoring method based on the probabilistic judgment model Jev. The method jointly provides Jev with evidence of association, conditional dependence, and directionality from observational data and edge probabilities produced by the causal discovery foundation model CDFM. Jev produces probabilistic judgments about direct causal edges, and a graph-level score is obtained by measuring the agreement between the adjacency structure of the graph under evaluation and these edge-level judgments. Across 300 synthetic datasets, the score exhibits a relatively strong negative correlation with structural error in all 20 combinations of four causal discovery algorithms and five variable counts, indicating that higher scores generally correspond to smaller structural errors. In 500 synthetic graph selection tasks, CausalGrade achieves a best-candidate hit rate of 54.4\%, exceeding the 48.4\% achieved by the Self-Compatibility metric \(\kappa_G\), further supporting its ability to discriminate the structural quality of graphs under evaluation.