NOTEARS: Continuous Optimization for Causal Structure Learning

NOTEARS (No Tears: Acyclicity Regression Structure) is a causal structure learning algorithm introduced by Zheng, Aragam, Ravikumar, and Xing in 2018 at NeurIPS. It reformulates the combinatorially hard problem of learning a directed acyclic graph (DAG) from observational data as a continuous, smooth optimization problem, enabling the use of standard gradient-based solvers and removing the need for exhaustive combinatorial search over graph space.