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About this paper
Dominik Janzing, Patrick Blöbaum, Atalanti A. Mastakouri, Philipp M. Faller, Lenon Minorics, Kailash Budhathoki
Janzing et al. at Amazon Research Tübingen develop Intrinsic Causal Contribution (ICC), a measure that quantifies the portion of a node's influence on a target originating from its own mechanism, distinct from inherited effects, using structure-preserving interventions on noise variables in Structural Causal Models. This approach attributes uncertainty reduction to specific causal sources, yielding different insights compared to traditional causal influence metrics in analyses of river flow and fuel consumption.
Key insights
- Intrinsic causal contributions can be formally defined and quantified by focusing on interventions at the level of exogenous noise variables within SCMs, rather than traditional interventions on observed variables.
- The framework's interpretation relies on 'structure-preserving interventions,' operating at Pearl's 'rung 3' of causation, allowing for a more fine-grained understanding of counterfactual influence from a node's local mechanism.
- ICC provides a decomposition of a target variable's total uncertainty into contributions from each ancestor's intrinsic noise, analogous to Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) principles for independent factors.
Summary by alphaXiv.
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