A general identification condition for causal effects

  • Authors:
  • Jin Tian;Judea Pearl

  • Affiliations:
  • Cognitive Systems Laboratory, Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA;Cognitive Systems Laboratory, Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA

  • Venue:
  • Eighteenth national conference on Artificial intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

This paper concerns the assessment of the effects of actions or policy interventions from a combination of: (i) nonexperimental data, and (ii) substantive assumptions. The assumptions are encoded in the form of a directed acyclic graph, also called "causal graph", in which some variables are presumed to be unobserved. The paper establishes a necessary and sufficient criterion for the identifiability of the causal effects of a singleton variable on all other variables in the model, and a powerful sufficient criterion for the effects of a singleton variable on any set of variables.