A Survey of Methods, Challenges and Perspectives in Causality

The Causality field aims to find systematic methods for uncovering cause-effect relationships. Such methods can find applications in many research fields, justifying a great interest in this domain. Machine Learning models have shown success in a large variety of tasks by extracting correlation patterns from high-dimensional data but still struggle when generalizing out of their initial distribution. As causal engines aim to learn mechanisms that are independent from a data distribution, combining Machine Learning with Causality has the potential to bring benefits to the two fields. In our work, we motivate this assumption and provide applications. We first perform an extensive overview of the theories and methods for Causality from different perspectives. We then provide a deeper look at the connections between Causality and Machine Learning and describe the challenges met by the two domains. We show the early attempts to bring the fields together and the possible perspectives for the future. We finish by providing a large variety of applications for techniques from Causality.