ORCA: ORchestrating Causal Agent

Abstract: Causal inference is essential for decision-making science while the complexity of the data analysis workflow, ranging from data wrangling to causal analysis, increases substantially as the scale of data grows in complicated business environments. Especially, the execution of the workflow in relational databases by non-experts can result in repetitive bottlenecks which impede timely and responsible business insights. To address this challenge, we propose ORCA (Orchestrating Causal Agent), an LLM agentic system that can automate routine workflows in RDBMS while preserving expert oversight via human-AI interactions. ORCA orchestrates the full data analysis pipeline: interpreting natural language queries, navigating tables from DB servers, generating proper SQL codes, preprocessing data, and configuring modeling processes using causal inference libraries. Domain experts still can control the automation through iterative interactions with ORCA, enabling robust data-driven decision making with less technical expertise in statistical computing. Empirical evaluations on benchmark and synthetic e-commerce datasets demonstrate competitive performance of ORCA in table understanding, query generation, and cause-effect estimation -- achieving over $7\times$ improvement in estimating average treatment compared to GPT-4o mini.