Related papers: From Causal Models To Counterfactual Structures
This paper presents a sound and completecalculus for causal relevance, based onPearl's functional models semantics.The calculus consists of axioms and rulesof inference for reasoning about causalrelevance relationships.We extend the set of…
Counterfactual reasoning, a cornerstone of human cognition and decision-making, is often seen as the 'holy grail' of causal learning, with applications ranging from interpreting machine learning models to promoting algorithmic fairness.…
Counterfactual explanations (CEs) are methods for generating an alternative scenario that produces a different desirable outcome. For example, if a student is predicted to fail a course, then counterfactual explanations can provide the…
Interpretability research on large language models (LLMs) has yielded important insights into model behaviour, yet recurring pitfalls persist: findings that do not generalise, and causal interpretations that outrun the evidence. Our…
In (Beckers, 2025) I introduced nondeterministic causal models as a generalization of Pearl's standard deterministic causal models. I here take advantage of the increased expressivity offered by these models to offer a novel definition of…
Model explanations based on pure observational data cannot compute the effects of features reliably, due to their inability to estimate how each factor alteration could affect the rest. We argue that explanations should be based on the…
We propose a new definition of actual causes, using structural equations to model counterfactuals.We show that the definitions yield a plausible and elegant account ofcausation that handles well examples which have caused problems forother…
Causal Modeling Semantics (CMS, e.g., Galles and Pearl 1998; Pearl 2000; Halpern 2000) is a powerful framework for evaluating counterfactuals whose antecedent is a conjunction of atomic formulas. We extend CMS to an evaluation of the…
Causal models defined in terms of structural equations have proved to be quite a powerful way of representing knowledge regarding causality. However, a number of authors have given examples that seem to show that the Halpern-Pearl (HP)…
The framework of Pearl's Causal Hierarchy (PCH) formalizes three types of reasoning: probabilistic (i.e. purely observational), interventional, and counterfactual, that reflect the progressive sophistication of human thought regarding…
One well motivated explanation method for classifiers leverages counterfactuals which are hypothetical events identical to real observations in all aspects except for one feature. Constructing such counterfactual poses specific challenges…
Causal Models are like Dependency Graphs and Belief Nets in that they provide a structure and a set of assumptions from which a joint distribution can, in principle, be computed. Unlike Dependency Graphs, Causal Models are models of…
We formally prove the existence of an enduring incongruence pervading a widespread interpretation of the Bell inequality and explain how to rationally avoid it with a natural assumption justified by explicit reference to a mathematical…
Causal world models are systems that can answer counterfactual questions about an environment of interest, i.e. predict how it would have evolved if an arbitrary subset of events had been realized differently. It requires understanding the…
Interpretability research takes counterfactual theories of causality for granted. Most causal methods rely on counterfactual interventions to inputs or the activations of particular model components, followed by observations of the change…
Causal and counterfactual reasoning are emerging directions in data science that allow us to reason about hypothetical scenarios. This is particularly useful in fields like environmental and ecological sciences, where interventional data…
We show that it is possible to understand and identify a decision maker's subjective causal judgements by observing her preferences over interventions. Following Pearl [2000], we represent causality using causal models (also called…
Counterfactual explanations have been widely studied in explainability, with a range of application dependent methods emerging in fairness, recourse and model understanding. However, the major shortcoming associated with these methods is…
We propose a new definition of actual cause, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. We show that the definition yields a plausible and elegant account of causation that handles well examples which have caused problems for…
We propose new definitions of (causal) explanation, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. The definition is based on the notion of actual cause, as defined and motivated in a companion paper. Essentially, an explanation is a…