Causal identification with $Y_0$

TL;DR

The paper introduces the $Y_0$ Python package, which implements causal identification algorithms for analyzing causation from various data sources, aiding researchers in qualitative causal assessment and symbolic estimation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive software toolkit with a domain-specific language, graphical model representations, and algorithms for causal identification from diverse data types.

Findings

Supports interventional, counterfactual, and transportability queries

Enables qualitative causal analysis before estimation

Includes implementations of recent causal inference algorithms

Abstract

We present the $Y_0$ Python package, which implements causal identification algorithms that apply interventional, counterfactual, and transportability queries to data from (randomized) controlled trials, observational studies, or mixtures thereof. $Y_0$ focuses on the qualitative investigation of causation, helping researchers determine whether a causal relationship can be estimated from available data before attempting to estimate how strong that relationship is. Furthermore, $Y_0$ provides guidance on how to transform the causal query into a symbolic estimand that can be non-parametrically estimated from the available data. $Y_0$ provides a domain-specific language for representing causal queries and estimands as symbolic probabilistic expressions, tools for representing causal graphical models with unobserved confounders, such as acyclic directed mixed graphs (ADMGs), and implementations of numerous identification algorithms from the recent causal inference literature. The $Y_0$ source code can be found under the MIT License at https://github.com/y0-causal-inference/y0 and it can be installed with pip install y0.