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Poster
On Measuring Causal Contributions via do-interventions
Yonghan Jung · Shiva Kasiviswanathan · Jin Tian · Dominik Janzing · Patrick Bloebaum · Elias Bareinboim

Tue Jul 19 03:30 PM -- 05:30 PM (PDT) @ Hall E #503
in Poster Session 1 »

Causal contributions measure the strengths of different causes to a target quantity. Understanding causal contributions is important in empirical sciences and data-driven disciplines since it allows to answer practical queries like ``what are the contributions of each cause to the effect?'' In this paper, we develop a principled method for quantifying causal contributions. First, we provide desiderata of properties axioms that causal contribution measures should satisfy and propose the do-Shapley values (inspired by do-interventions [Pearl, 2000]) as a unique method satisfying these properties. Next, we develop a criterion under which the do-Shapley values can be efficiently inferred from non-experimental data. Finally, we provide do-Shapley estimators exhibiting consistency, computational feasibility, and statistical robustness. Simulation results corroborate with the theory.

Keywords: MISC: Causality · SA: Accountability, Transparency and Interpretability
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Author Information

Yonghan Jung (Purdue University)
Shiva Kasiviswanathan (Amazon Research AI)
Jin Tian (Iowa State University)
Dominik Janzing (Amazon)
Patrick Bloebaum (Amazon AWS)
Elias Bareinboim (Columbia University)
Elias Bareinboim

Elias Bareinboim is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and the director of the Causal Artificial Intelligence (CausalAI) Laboratory at Columbia University. His research focuses on causal and counterfactual inference and their applications to artificial intelligence and machine learning as well as data-driven fields in the health and social sciences. His work was the first to propose a general solution to the problem of "causal data-fusion," providing practical methods for combining datasets generated under different experimental conditions and plagued with various biases. In the last years, Bareinboim has been exploring the intersection of causal inference with decision-making (including reinforcement learning) and explainability (including fairness analysis). Before joining Columbia, he was an assistant professor at Purdue University and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Bareinboim was named one of ``AI's 10 to Watch'' by IEEE, and is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, the Dan David Prize Scholarship, the 2014 AAAI Outstanding Paper Award, and the 2019 UAI Best Paper Award.

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