Causal Transportability with Limited Experiments

By Elias Bareinboim, Judea Pearl. 2013

60 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We address the problem of transferring causal knowledge learned in one environment to another, potentially different environment, when only limited experiments may be conducted at the source. This generalizes the treatment of transportability introduced in [Pearl and Bareinboim, 2011; Bareinboim and Pearl, 2012b], which deals with transferring causal information when any experiment can be conducted at the source. Given that it is not always feasible to conduct certain controlled experiments, we consider the decision problem whether experiments on a selected subset Z of variables together with qualitative assumptions encoded in a diagram may render causal effects in the target environment computable from the available data. This problem, which we call z-transportability, reduces to ordinary transportability when Z is all-inclusive, and, like the latter, can be given syntactic characterization using the do-calculus [Pearl, 1995; 2000]. This paper establishes a necessary and sufficient condition for causal effects in the target domain to be estimable from both the non-experimental information available and the limited experimental information transferred from the source. We further provides a complete algorithm for computing the transport formula, that is, a way of fusing experimental and observational information to synthesize an unbiased estimate of the desired causal relation.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and Probability

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Citations in the corpus

Recovering from Selection Bias in Causal and Statistical Inference (2014, background): “This paper complements another aspect of the generalization problem in which causal effects are transported among differing environments (Bareinboim and Pearl 2013a; 2013b).”
Transportability from Multiple Environments with Limited Experiments: Completeness Results (2014, background): “A simple analysis can show that R cannot be transported from either source alone (even when experiments are available over both variables) [9].”
A General Algorithm for Deciding Transportability of Experimental Results (2013, background): “Bareinboim and Pearl [2] have addressed the problem of transportability in cases where only a limited set of experiments can be conducted at the source environment.”
Meta-Transportability of Causal Effects: A Formal Approach (2013, background): “This paper complements a recent work on a task called z-transportability (Bareinboim and Pearl, 2013a), which deals with transferring causal information when just limited experiments are available for use.”
Transportability from Multiple Environments with Limited Experiments (2013, background): “A simple analysis based on [12] can show that R cannot be z-transported from either source alone, but it turns out that combining in a special way experiments from both sources allows one to determine the effect in the target.”