Abstract: A data processing apparatus comprises at least one processor configured to execute an input module to receive an input dataset comprising a plurality of samples, each assigned to one of a plurality of variables, an encoder module to map the input dataset to a latent representation, a decoder module to process the latent representation and indicate a link category for each pair of variables, wherein the link category is selected from a set of categories including ‘no causal link’, ‘causally linked’ and ‘unknown’, and a reinforcement learning, RL, module to: (i) compare the link category for each pair of variables with the samples for the associated variables, (ii) generate a score function including an error term based on a result of the comparison, and (iii) update one or more parameters of the encoder module and decoder module based on the score function.