论文标题
不确定因果网络中的因果效应鉴定
Causal Effect Identification in Uncertain Causal Networks
论文作者
论文摘要
因果鉴定是因果推理文献的核心,在该文献中提出了完整的算法来识别感兴趣的因果问题。这些算法的有效性取决于访问正确指定的因果结构的限制性假设。在这项工作中,我们研究了可获得因果结构概率模型的环境。具体而言,因果图中存在的边缘存在不确定性,例如,可能代表了领域专家的信念程度。或者,边缘的不确定性可能反映了特定统计检验的置信度。在这种情况下自然出现的问题是:给定这样的概率图和感兴趣的特定因果效应,什么是具有最高合理性的子图,以及可为之识别的因果效应?我们表明回答这个问题减少了解决NP完整组合优化问题,我们称之为边缘ID问题。我们提出有效的算法来近似此问题,并针对现实世界网络和随机生成的图进行评估。
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.