Axiomatization of interventional probability distributions

Kayvan Sadeghi and Terry Soo

Biometrika, 2025, vol. 112, issue 1, 507-56

Abstract: Causal intervention is an essential tool in causal inference. It is axiomatized under the rules of do-calculus in the case of structure causal models. We provide simple axiomatizations for families of probability distributions to be different types of interventional distributions. Our axiomatizations neatly lead to a simple and clear theory of causality that has several advantages: it does not need to make use of any modelling assumptions such as those imposed by structural causal models; it relies only on interventions on single variables; it includes most cases with latent variables and causal cycles; and, more importantly, it does not assume the existence of an underlying true causal graph as we do not take it as the primitive object; moreover, a causal graph is derived as a by-product of our theory. We show that, under our axiomatizations, the intervened distributions are Markovian to the defined intervened causal graphs, and an observed joint probability distribution is Markovian to the obtained causal graph; these results are consistent with the case of structural causal models, and as a result, the existing theory of causal inference applies. We also show that a large class of natural structural causal models satisfy the theory presented here. The aim of this paper is axiomatization of interventional families, which is subtly different from causal modelling.

Keywords: Ancestral graph; Causal graph; Directed graph; Do-calculus; Interventional distribution; Markov property; Structural causal model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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