Abstract:
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.

Published Date: 2020-06-02
Registration: ISSN 2374-3468 (Online) ISSN 2159-5399 (Print) ISBN 978-1-57735-835-0 (10 issue set)
Copyright: Published by AAAI Press, Palo Alto, California USA Copyright © 2020, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence All Rights Reserved
DOI:
10.1609/aaai.v34i06.6577