Critical Minerals
Causal Engine
Pearl's Ladder of Causation (L1/L2/L3) over an ODE commodity model, validated against CEPII BACI bilateral trade data. Identify supply shocks, trace trade circumvention, and answer counterfactual policy questions across eight critical minerals — graphite, rare earths, lithium, cobalt, nickel, uranium, germanium, and gallium.
The pipeline · Documents → KG → ODE → Counterfactual
Step 1
Documents → Knowledge Graph
HippoRAG retrieves USGS / IEA / CEPII passages. Claude extracts (subject, relation, object) triples. 472 entities, 588 edges.
Step 2
KG → ODE shocks → Trajectory
Year-specific shares feed the {K, I, P} ODE. Pearl L2 do-calculus on substitution and fringe supply nodes. Annual price index forward.
Step 3
Pearl L3 — what would have been
Abduction-Action-Prediction. Recover noise from the realised trajectory, intervene, replay. Quantifies the causal price premium of a policy.
Model validation — CEPII BACI price series
91.7%
In-sample DA
10 episodes
65.7%
Clean OOS DA
5 transfer pairs
+33.4pp
vs Momentum
directional accuracy
+23.6pp
vs Conc. Heuristic
directional accuracy
Directional accuracy (DA) on price index year-on-year moves · OOS = parameters transferred across episodes without re-fitting · Baselines receive no shock information
Tools
Transshipment Detection
Trace multi-hop CEPII trade routes. Estimate circumvention rates with bootstrap CIs.
Counterfactual Analysis
Pearl L3 abduction-action-prediction. Fix noise, change mechanism, see what would have been.
Knowledge Query
Ask questions against 1,661 USGS/CEPII/IEA chunks via HippoRAG personalized PageRank.
Knowledge Graph
Explore 3,132 entities and 31,916 causal edges. Filter by commodity or relationship type.
Shock Extractor
Paste any news article. KG extracts shocks, runs the ODE model, returns a price trajectory.
Scenario Builder
Pick a pre-rendered episode or generate a custom KG render via HippoRAG + Claude triple extraction.
KG Enrich
Grow the causal KG: HippoRAG retrieves chunks, Claude extracts triples, merged into the live graph.
Causal framework — Pearl's Ladder
Association
Seeing
P(Y | X=x). Correlations from BACI bilateral flows — no causal claim.
Intervention
Doing
P(Y | do(X=x)). Graph surgery on the SCM + calibrated parameters (η_D, α_P, τ_K).
Counterfactual
Imagining
P(Y_x | X=x′). Abduction-action-prediction with twin-network SDE noise replay.
Commodities
◆ Graphite
China · Madagascar · Mozambique
✦ Rare earths
China · USA · Australia
⬡ Lithium
Australia · Chile · China
◉ Cobalt
DRC · Russia · Australia
○ Nickel
Indonesia · Philippines · Russia
◎ Uranium
Kazakhstan · Canada · Australia
◈ Germanium
China · Russia · USA
⬢ Gallium
China · Japan · Korea
Knowledge graph
1,661
Docs indexed
chunks (500 tok)
4,368
OpenIE triples
gpt-4o-mini extracted
3,132
KG entities
unique after norm.
31,916
KG edges
igraph directed
HippoRAG personalized PageRank · text-embedding-3-large 3072-dim · gpt-4o-mini OpenIE cache
Data sources
CEPII BACI
1995–2024 · pre-reconciled bilateral flows · ISO 3166-1 normalized
USGS MCS
2020–2024 · 5 annual volumes · 17 commodities · reserves + production
IEA 2021
Critical minerals supply chain risk · 20 chunks
DRC Reports
2 artisanal cobalt reports · 79 chunks