Causal Identification under Markov equivalence: Calculus, Algorithm, and Completeness

Amin Jaber, Adele H Ribeiro, Jiji Zhang, Elias Bareinboim

Keywords: causality, causal inference, Markov equivalence, causal effect identification

TL;DR: We close the problem of conditional effect identification under Markov equivalence in terms of delineating the theoretical boundaries of what is computable from non-experimental data.

Abstract: One common task in many data sciences applications is to answer questions about the effect of new interventions, like: `what would happen to $Y$ if we make $X$ equal to $x$ while observing covariates $Z=z$?'. Formally, this is known as conditional effect identification, where the goal is to determine whether a post-interventional distribution is computable from the combination of an observational distribution and assumptions about the underlying domain represented by a causal diagram. A plethora of methods was developed for solving this problem, including the celebrated do-calculus [Pearl, 1995]. In practice, these results are not always applicable since they require a fully specified causal diagram as input, which is usually not available. In this paper, we assume as the input of the task a less informative structure known as a partial ancestral graph (PAG), which represents a Markov equivalence class of causal diagrams, learnable from observational data. We make the following contributions under this relaxed setting. First, we introduce a new causal calculus, which subsumes the current state-of-the-art, PAG-calculus. Second, we develop an algorithm for conditional effect identification given a PAG and prove it to be both sound and complete. In words, failure of the algorithm to identify a certain effect implies that this effect is not identifiable by any method. Third, we prove the proposed calculus to be complete for the same task.