Probabilistic Reasoning Across the Causal Hierarchy

2020-06-02

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 34

Volume

Vol. 34 No. 06: AAAI-20 Technical Tracks 6

AAAI Technical Track: Reasoning under Uncertainty

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.

10.1609/aaai.v34i06.6577