Prior-data fitted networks for variable selection

arXiv:2611.05966v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prior-data fitted networks (PFNs) have become state-of-the-art for tabular prediction but remain underexplored in other areas of statistics. In this work, we present two PFNs for Bayesian variable selection: CD-PFN identifies conditional dependencies, and PC-PFN identifies parents and children in a causal graph. Both networks estimate posterior inclusion probabilities (PIPs) without posterior samples or data-specific modeling. In semi-synthetic and real data experiments, CD-PFN and PC-PFN often outperform existing methods, demonstrating the value of PFNs for variable selection and their potential in statistics more broadly. Open-source software is available.