6533b855fe1ef96bd12b07e5
RESEARCH PRODUCT
Identifying Causal Effects with the R Package causaleffect
Santtu TikkaJuha Karvanensubject
Statistics and ProbabilityFOS: Computer and information sciencesTheoretical computer sciencecausalityDistribution (number theory)C-componentComputer sciencecausal model02 engineering and technologyCausal structureMethodology (stat.ME)03 medical and health sciences0302 clinical medicinedo-calculusJoint probability distribution0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering030212 general & internal medicineDAG; do-calculus; causality; causal model; identifiability; graph; C-component; hedge; d-separationlcsh:Statisticslcsh:HA1-4737Statistics - Methodologycomputer.programming_languageCausal modelta112DAGd-separationgraphhedgeidentifiabilityExpression (mathematics)PEARL (programming language)Action (philosophy)kausaliteetti020201 artificial intelligence & image processingStatistics Probability and UncertaintycomputerSoftwaredescription
Do-calculus is concerned with estimating the interventional distribution of an action from the observed joint probability distribution of the variables in a given causal structure. All identifiable causal effects can be derived using the rules of do-calculus, but the rules themselves do not give any direct indication whether the effect in question is identifiable or not. Shpitser and Pearl constructed an algorithm for identifying joint interventional distributions in causal models, which contain unobserved variables and induce directed acyclic graphs. This algorithm can be seen as a repeated application of the rules of do-calculus and known properties of probabilities, and it ultimately either derives an expression for the causal distribution, or fails to identify the effect, in which case the effect is non-identifiable. In this paper, the R package causaleffect is presented, which provides an implementation of this algorithm. Functionality of causaleffect is also demonstrated through examples.
| year | journal | country | edition | language |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-01-01 |