Yann LeCun, now of Facebook, was interviewed by The Register. It is interesting that his view of AI is apparently that of a prediction tool:
"In some ways you could say intelligence is all about prediction," he explained. "What you can identify in intelligence is it can predict what is going to happen in the world with more accuracy and more time horizon than others."
rather than of a world optimizer. This is not very surprising, given his background in handwriting and image recognition. This "AI as intelligence augmentation" view appears to be prevalent among the AI researchers in general.
Bayesian network learning and Bayesian network inference can, in principle, solve that problem.
Of course, if your model is wrong, and/or your dataset is degenerate, any approach will give you bad results: Gargbage in, garbage out.
Bayesian networks are statistical, not causal models.