Title
Causal Reasoning with Ancestral Graphs
Abstract
Causal reasoning is primarily concerned with what would happen to a system under external interventions. In particular, we are often interested in predicting the probability distribution of some random variables that would result if some other variables were forced to take certain values. One prominent approach to tackling this problem is based on causal Bayesian networks, using directed acyclic graphs as causal diagrams to relate post-intervention probabilities to pre-intervention probabilities that are estimable from observational data. However, such causal diagrams are seldom fully testable given observational data. In consequence, many causal discovery algorithms based on data-mining can only output an equivalence class of causal diagrams (rather than a single one). This paper is concerned with causal reasoning given an equivalence class of causal diagrams, represented by a (partial) ancestral graph. We present two main results. The first result extends Pearl (1995)'s celebrated do-calculus to the context of ancestral graphs. In the second result, we focus on a key component of Pearl's calculus---the property of invariance under interventions, and give stronger graphical conditions for this property than those implied by the first result. The second result also improves the earlier, similar results due to Spirtes et al. (1993).
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1145/1390681.1442780
Journal of Machine Learning Research
Keywords
Field
DocType
causal bayesian network,ancestral graphs,causal discovery,similar result,do-calculus,ancestral graph,main result,acyclic graph,causal reasoning,equivalence class,observational data,intervention,causal diagram,random variable,data mining,bayesian network,probability distribution,directed acyclic graph
Graph,Causal reasoning,Random variable,Invariant (physics),Directed acyclic graph,Probability distribution,Bayesian network,Artificial intelligence,Equivalence class,Machine learning,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
9,
1532-4435
23
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.61
11
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jiji Zhang114917.52