Title: Causal Inference and Reasoning in Causally Insu-cient Systems
Abstract: The big question that motivates this dissertation is the following: under what conditions and to what extent can passive observations inform us of the structure of causal connections among a set of variables and of the potential outcome of an active intervention on some of the variables? The particular concern here revolves around the common kind of situations where the variables of interest, though measurable themselves, may suffer from confounding due to unobserved common causes. Relying on a graphical representation of causally insufficient systems called maximal ancestral graphs, and two well-known principles widely discussed in the literature, the causal Markov and Faithfulness conditions, we show that the FCI algorithm, a sound inference procedure in the literature for inferring features of the unknown causal structure from facts of probabilistic independence and dependence, is, with some extra sound inference rules, also complete in the sense that any feature of the causal structure left undecided by the inference procedure is indeed underdetermined by facts of probabilistic independence and dependence. In addition, we consider the issue of quantitative reasoning about effects of local interventions with the FCI-learnable features of the unknown causal structure. We improve and generalize two important pieces of work in the literature about identifying intervention effects. We also provide some preliminary study of the testability of the Causal Faithfulness Condition.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 26
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