Causal Effect Identification in Uncertain Causal Networks
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2208.04627v3
- Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2023 15:58:19 GMT
- Title: Causal Effect Identification in Uncertain Causal Networks
- Authors: Sina Akbari, Fateme Jamshidi, Ehsan Mokhtarian, Matthew J. Vowels,
Jalal Etesami, Negar Kiyavash
- Abstract summary: Causal identification is at the core of the causal inference literature.
We show that the edges in a causal graph exist with uncertainties which may, for example, represent degree of belief from domain experts.
We propose efficient algorithms to approximate this problem evaluate them against both real-world networks and randomly generated graphs.
- Score: 30.239874638041904
- License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
- Abstract: Causal identification is at the core of the causal inference literature,
where complete algorithms have been proposed to identify causal queries of
interest. The validity of these algorithms hinges on the restrictive assumption
of having access to a correctly specified causal structure. In this work, we
study the setting where a probabilistic model of the causal structure is
available. Specifically, the edges in a causal graph exist with uncertainties
which may, for example, represent degree of belief from domain experts.
Alternatively, the uncertainty about an edge may reflect the confidence of a
particular statistical test. The question that naturally arises in this setting
is: Given such a probabilistic graph and a specific causal effect of interest,
what is the subgraph which has the highest plausibility and for which the
causal effect is identifiable? We show that answering this question reduces to
solving an NP-complete combinatorial optimization problem which we call the
edge ID problem. We propose efficient algorithms to approximate this problem
and evaluate them against both real-world networks and randomly generated
graphs.
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