Related papers: Sufficient and necessary causation are dual
As autonomous systems rapidly become ubiquitous, there is a growing need for a legal and regulatory framework to address when and how such a system harms someone. There have been several attempts within the philosophy literature to define…
Thinking in terms of causality helps us structure how different parts of a system depend on each other, and how interventions on one part of a system may result in changes to other parts. Therefore, formal models of causality are an…
Causality is the relationship where one event contributes to the production of another, with the cause being partly responsible for the effect and the effect partly dependent on the cause. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective…
In recent years the search for a proper formal definition of actual causation -- i.e., the relation of cause-effect as it is instantiated in specific observations, rather than general causal relations -- has taken on impressive proportions.…
A serious defect with the Halpern-Pearl (HP) definition of causality is repaired by combining a theory of causality with a theory of defaults. In addition, it is shown that (despite a claim to the contrary) a cause according to the HP…
With recent advances in natural language processing, rationalization becomes an essential self-explaining diagram to disentangle the black box by selecting a subset of input texts to account for the major variation in prediction. Yet,…
A definition of causality introduced by Halpern and Pearl, which uses structural equations, is reviewed. A more refined definition is then considered, which takes into account issues of normality and typicality, which are well known to…
Causal models defined in terms of a collection of equations, as defined by Pearl, are axiomatized here. Axiomatizations are provided for three successively more general classes of causal models: (1) the class of recursive theories (those…
Causal models defined in terms of a collection of equations, as defined by Pearl, are axiomatized here. Axiomatizations are provided for three successively more general classes of causal models: (1) the class of recursive theories (those…
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…
We present a definition of cause and effect in terms of decision-theoretic primitives and thereby provide a principled foundation for causal reasoning. Our definition departs from the traditional view of causation in that causal assertions…
In this paper, we discuss necessary and sufficient explanations for formal argumentation - the question whether and why a certain argument can be accepted (or not) under various extension-based semantics. Given a framework with which…
Causality is a non-obvious concept that is often considered to be related to temporality. In this paper we present a number of past and present approaches to the definition of temporality and causality from philosophical, physical, and…
Causality is a subject of philosophical debate and a central scientific issue with a long history. In the statistical domain, the study of cause and effect based on the notion of `fairness' in comparisons dates back several hundred years,…
The design of scientific experiments deserves its own variation of formal verification to catch cases where scientists made important mistakes, such as forgetting to take confounding variables into account. One of the most fundamental…
In this paper, we propose causality as a unified framework to explain query answers and non-answers, thus generalizing and extending several previously proposed approaches of provenance and missing query result explanations. We develop our…
In this position paper we discuss three main shortcomings of existing approaches to counterfactual causality from the computer science perspective, and sketch lines of work to try and overcome these issues: (1) causality definitions should…
Philosophical analyses of causation take many forms but one major difficulty they all aim to address is that of the spatio-temporal continuity between causes and their effects. Bertrand Russell in 1913 brought the problem to its most…
From the standpoint of applied ontology, the problem of understanding and modeling causation has been recently challenged on the premise that causation is real. As a consequence, the following three results were obtained: (1) causation can…
We present a formal theory for analysing causality in cyber-physical systems. To this end, we extend the theory of actual causality by Halpern and Pearl to cope with the continuous nature of cyber-physical systems. Based on our theory, we…