Machine learningCausal discovery

GES Algorithm — Greedy Equivalence Search for Causal Discovery

Greedy Equivalence Search (GES) is a score-based algorithm for learning the causal structure of a set of variables from observational data. Introduced by David Maxwell Chickering in 2002, GES operates directly on Markov equivalence classes of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), represented as completed partially directed acyclic graphs (CPDAGs). Under the assumptions of causal sufficiency and a faithful data-generating process, GES is proven to recover the true equivalence class in the large-sample limit.

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Sources

  1. Chickering, D. M. (2002). Optimal structure identification with greedy search. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3, 507–554. link

Related methods

ScholarGateGES Algorithm (Greedy Equivalence Search (GES)). Retrieved 2026-06-04 from https://scholargate.app/en/causal-inference/ges-algorithm