Related papers: Heritability: A Counterfactual Perspective
Existing tools for explaining complex models and systems are associational rather than causal and do not provide mechanistic understanding. We propose a new notion called counterfactual explainability for causal attribution that is…
In this paper we look at popular fairness methods that use causal counterfactuals. These methods capture the intuitive notion that a prediction is fair if it coincides with the prediction that would have been made if someone's race, gender…
In the field of genetics, the concept of heritability refers to the proportion of variations of a biological trait or disease that can be explained by genetic factors. Quantifying the heritability of a disease is a fundamental challenge in…
Traditionally, heritability has been estimated using family-based methods such as twin studies. Advancements in molecular genomics have facilitated the development of alternative methods that utilise large samples of unrelated or related…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
Family studies provide an important tool for understanding etiology of diseases, with the key aim of discovering evidence of family aggregation and to determine if such aggregation can be attributed to genetic components. Heritability and…
We try a conceptual analysis of inheritance diagrams, first in abstract terms, and then compare to "normality" and the "small/big sets" of preferential and related reasoning. The main ideas are about nodes as truth values and information…
In their recent comment, Cockell et al. argue that the habitability of an environment is fundamentally a binary property; that is to say, an environment can either support the metabolic processes of a given organism or not. The habitability…
Hazard serves as a pivotal estimand in both practical applications and methodological frameworks. However, its causal interpretation poses notable challenges, including inherent selection biases and ill-defined populations to be compared…
Fairness in predictions is of direct importance in practice due to legal, ethical, and societal reasons. This is often accomplished through counterfactual fairness, which ensures that the prediction for an individual is the same as that in…
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…
Machine learning can impact people with legal or ethical consequences when it is used to automate decisions in areas such as insurance, lending, hiring, and predictive policing. In many of these scenarios, previous decisions have been made…
We propose a formal model for counterfactual estimation with unobserved confounding in "data-rich" settings, i.e., where there are a large number of units and a large number of measurements per unit. Our model provides a bridge between the…
In previous work with Joost Vennekens I proposed a definition of actual causation that is based on certain plausible principles, thereby allowing the debate on causation to shift away from its heavy focus on examples towards a more…
It is high time to openly and without finalism define the dangerous but needed term 'purposeful information', whose quantity is an Eigen information value. Using the term 'biological information' in its stead forces one into an…
Counterfactual inference is a powerful tool, capable of solving challenging problems in high-profile sectors. To perform counterfactual inference, one requires knowledge of the underlying causal mechanisms. However, causal mechanisms cannot…
This paper shows how nature (i.e., one's genetic endowments) and nurture (i.e., one's environment) interact in producing educational attainment. Genetic endowments are measured using a polygenic score for educational attainment, while we…
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,…
Nature (one's genes) and nurture (one's environment) jointly contribute to the formation and evolution of health and human capital over the life cycle. This complex interplay between genes and environment can be estimated and quantified…
Counterfactual learning has become promising for understanding and modeling causality in complex and dynamic systems. This paper presents a novel method for counterfactual learning in the context of multivariate time series analysis and…