Structure-Based Causes and Explanations in the Independent Choice Logic

TL;DR

This paper integrates Pearl's structural causal models with Poole's independent choice logic, enhancing causal reasoning with probabilistic, first-order, and action-based modeling capabilities.

Contribution

It presents a novel mapping from the independent choice logic to structural causal models, combining their strengths for advanced causal reasoning.

Findings

Probabilistic theories in independent choice logic can be mapped to causal models.

The integration introduces first-order and action modeling into causal reasoning.

The approach captures sophisticated notions of causality and explanation.

Abstract

This paper is directed towards combining Pearl's structural-model approach to causal reasoning with high-level formalisms for reasoning about actions. More precisely, we present a combination of Pearl's structural-model approach with Poole's independent choice logic. We show how probabilistic theories in the independent choice logic can be mapped to probabilistic causal models. This mapping provides the independent choice logic with appealing concepts of causality and explanation from the structural-model approach. We illustrate this along Halpern and Pearl's sophisticated notions of actual cause, explanation, and partial explanation. This mapping also adds first-order modeling capabilities and explicit actions to the structural-model approach.