CauTrigger: deciphering biological system state transitions by hierarchical causal decomposition nature.com

Researchers led by Chengming Zhang and Deyu Cai developed CauTrigger, a hierarchical deep-learning model that uses causal inference to identify potential drivers of biological state changes and predict effects of perturbations from observational data. Tests on synthetic and biological datasets, including single-cell multi-omics and gut microbiome data, found it outperformed existing methods and generated candidate triggers for experimental follow-up.