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arXiv · 1210.4852

The Do-Calculus Revisited

Judea Pearl
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Abstract

The do-calculus was developed in 1995 to facilitate the identification of causal effects in non-parametric models. The completeness proofs of [Huang and Valtorta, 2006] and [Shpitser and Pearl, 2006] and the graphical criteria of [Tian and Shpitser, 2010] have laid this identification problem to rest. Recent explorations unveil the usefulness of the do-calculus in three additional areas: mediation analysis [Pearl, 2012], transportability [Pearl and Bareinboim, 2011] and metasynthesis. Meta-synthesis (freshly coined) is the task of fusing empirical results from several diverse studies, conducted on heterogeneous populations and under different conditions, so as to synthesize an estimate of a causal relation in some target environment, potentially different from those under study. The talk surveys these results with emphasis on the challenges posed by meta-synthesis. For background material, see http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/csl_papers.html

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Judea Pearl. 2012-10-16. The Do-Calculus Revisited. https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.4852

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