Related papers: Responsibility and blame: a structural-model appro…
Bayesian probability theory is one of the most successful frameworks to model reasoning under uncertainty. Its defining property is the interpretation of probabilities as degrees of belief in propositions about the state of the world…
It has been a long time issue in statistical physics how to combine reversible microscopic equations with irreversible macroscopic behavior. Recently, Evans and Searles have suggested causality as the key concept for a solution to the…
We present a basis for studying questions of cause and effect in statistics which subsumes and reconciles the models proposed by Pearl, Robins, Rubin and others, and which, as far as mathematical notions and notation are concerned, is…
When designing or analyzing multi-agent systems, a fundamental problem is responsibility ascription: to specify which agents are responsible for the joint outcome of their behaviors and to which extent. We model strategic multi-agent…
We describe the interface between measure theoretic probability and causal inference by constructing causal models on probability spaces within the potential outcomes framework. We find that measure theory provides a precise and instructive…
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,…
Causality is receiving increasing attention in the Recommendation Systems (RSs) community, which has realised that RSs could greatly benefit from causality to transform accurate predictions into effective and explainable decisions. Indeed,…
While probabilistic models describe the dependence structure between observed variables, causal models go one step further: they predict, for example, how cognitive functions are affected by external interventions that perturb neuronal…
The goal of causal inference is to understand the outcome of alternative courses of action. However, all causal inference requires assumptions. Such assumptions can be more influential than in typical tasks for probabilistic modeling, and…
Causality has been often confused with the notion of determinism. It is mandatory to separate the two notions in view of the debate about quantum foundations. Quantum theory provides an example of causal not-deterministic theory. Here we…
This paper proposes a formal framework for modeling the interaction of causal and (qualitative) epistemic reasoning. To this purpose, we extend the notion of a causal model with a representation of the epistemic state of an agent. On the…
Accountability is the property of a system that enables the uncovering of causes for events and helps understand who or what is responsible for these events. Definitions and interpretations of accountability differ; however, they are…
Understanding how much each variable contributes to an outcome is a central question across disciplines. A causal view of explainability is favorable for its ability in uncovering underlying mechanisms and generalizing to new contexts.…
This paper discusses different needs and approaches to establishing ``causation'' that are relevant in legal cases involving statistical input based on epidemiological (or more generally observational or population-based) information. We…
In a causal world the direction of the time arrow dictates how past causal events in a variable $X$ produce future effects in $Y$. $X$ is said to cause an effect in $Y$, if the predictability (uncertainty) about the future states of $Y$…
State-of-the-art AI models largely lack an understanding of the cause-effect relationship that governs human understanding of the real world. Consequently, these models do not generalize to unseen data, often produce unfair results, and are…
We describe recent research on the use of actual causality in the definition of responsibility scores as explanations for query answers in databases, and for outcomes from classification models in machine learning. In the case of databases,…
Recently, Halpern and Leung suggested representing uncertainty by a weighted set of probability measures, and suggested a way of making decisions based on this representation of uncertainty: maximizing weighted regret. Their paper does not…
The notion of actual causation, as formalized by Halpern and Pearl, has been recently applied to relational databases, to characterize and compute actual causes for possibly unexpected answers to monotone queries. Causes take the form of…
The concept of causal nonseparability has been recently introduced, in opposition to that of causal separability, to qualify physical processes that locally abide by the laws of quantum theory, but cannot be embedded in a well-defined…