On Causal Identification under Markov Equivalence

On Causal Identification under Markov Equivalence

Amin Jaber, Jiji Zhang, Elias Bareinboim

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Best Sister Conferences. Pages 6181-6185. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/859

In this work, we investigate the problem of computing an experimental distribution from a combination of the observational distribution and a partial qualitative description of the causal structure of the domain under investigation. This description is given by a partial ancestral graph (PAG) that represents a Markov equivalence class of causal diagrams, i.e., diagrams that entail the same conditional independence model over observed variables, and is learnable from the observational data. Accordingly, we develop a complete algorithm to compute the causal effect of an arbitrary set of intervention variables on an arbitrary outcome set.
Keywords:
Uncertainty in AI: Graphical Models
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change and Causality