Causal Calculus in the Presence of Cycles, Latent Confounders and Selection Bias

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 2019
Host editors
  • A. Globerson
  • R. Silva
Book title Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence
Book subtitle UAI 2019, Tel Aviv, Israel, July 22-25, 2019
Event Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence 2019
Article number 15
Number of pages 10
Publisher Corvallis, OR: AUAI Press
Organisations
  • Faculty of Science (FNWI) - Informatics Institute (IVI)
Abstract
We prove the main rules of causal calculus (also called do-calculus) for i/o structural causal models (ioSCMs), a generalization of a recently proposed general class of non-/linear structural causal models that allow for cycles, latent confounders and arbitrary probability distributions. We also generalize adjustment criteria and formulas from the acyclic setting to the general one (i.e. ioSCMs). Such criteria then allow to estimate (conditional) causal effects from observational data that was (partially) gathered under selection bias and cycles. This generalizes the backdoor criterion, the selection-backdoor criterion and extensions of these to arbitrary ioSCMs. Together, our results thus enable causal reasoning in the presence of cycles, latent confounders and selection bias. Finally, we extend the ID algorithm for the identification of causal effects to ioSCMs.
Document type Conference contribution
Note With supplement
Language English
Published at http://auai.org/uai2019/proceedings/papers/15.pdf https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.00433
Other links http://auai.org/uai2019/proceedings/supplements/15_supplement.pdf https://dblp.org/db/conf/uai/uai2019.html http://auai.org/uai2019/accepted.php
Downloads
15 (Accepted author manuscript)
Supplementary materials
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