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arXiv · 2009.09768

Identifying Causal Effects via Context-specific Independence Relations

Santtu Tikka·Antti Hyttinen·Juha Karvanen
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Abstract

Causal effect identification considers whether an interventional probability distribution can be uniquely determined from a passively observed distribution in a given causal structure. If the generating system induces context-specific independence (CSI) relations, the existing identification procedures and criteria based on do-calculus are inherently incomplete. We show that deciding causal effect non-identifiability is NP-hard in the presence of CSIs. Motivated by this, we design a calculus and an automated search procedure for identifying causal effects in the presence of CSIs. The approach is provably sound and it includes standard do-calculus as a special case. With the approach we can obtain identifying formulas that were unobtainable previously, and demonstrate that a small number of CSI-relations may be sufficient to turn a previously non-identifiable instance to identifiable.

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Santtu Tikka, Antti Hyttinen, Juha Karvanen. 2020-09-21. Identifying Causal Effects via Context-specific Independence Relations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.09768

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