English

Probabilistic Reasoning across the Causal Hierarchy

Logic in Computer Science 2021-06-03 v5 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We propose a formalization of the three-tier causal hierarchy of association, intervention, and counterfactuals as a series of probabilistic logical languages. Our languages are of strictly increasing expressivity, the first capable of expressing quantitative probabilistic reasoning -- including conditional independence and Bayesian inference -- the second encoding do-calculus reasoning for causal effects, and the third capturing a fully expressive do-calculus for arbitrary counterfactual queries. We give a corresponding series of finitary axiomatizations complete over both structural causal models and probabilistic programs, and show that satisfiability and validity for each language are decidable in polynomial space.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.02889,
  title  = {Probabilistic Reasoning across the Causal Hierarchy},
  author = {Duligur Ibeling and Thomas Icard},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.02889},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

AAAI-20

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:06:43.417Z