Performing optimization in the latent space can more flexibly model underlying data distributions than mechanistic approaches in the original hypothesis space. However, extrapolative prediction in sparsely explored regions of the hypothesis space can be poor. In many scientific disciplines, hypothesis spaces can be vastly larger than what can be examined through experimentation. For instance, it is estimated that there are approximately 1060 molecules, whereas even the largest chemical libraries contain fewer than 1010 molecules12,159. Therefore, there is a pressing need for methods to efficiently search through and identify high-quality candidate solutions in these largely unexplored regions.
Question: how does this notion of hypothesis space relate to causal inference and reasoning?