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arXiv · 1307.5636

A generalized back-door criterion

Marloes H. Maathuis·Diego Colombo
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Abstract

We generalize Pearl's back-door criterion for directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to more general types of graphs that describe Markov equivalence classes of DAGs and/or allow for arbitrarily many hidden variables. We also give easily checkable necessary and sufficient graphical criteria for the existence of a set of variables that satisfies our generalized back-door criterion, when considering a single intervention and a single outcome variable. Moreover, if such a set exists, we provide an explicit set that fulfills the criterion. We illustrate the results in several examples. R-code is available in the R-package pcalg.

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Marloes H. Maathuis, Diego Colombo. 2015-06-03. A generalized back-door criterion. https://doi.org/10.1214/14-aos1295

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