Causal Analysis in Theory and Practice

May 31, 2020

What Statisticians Want to Know about Causal Inference and The Book of Why

Filed under: Causal Effect,DAGs,Discussion,Economics,Epidemiology,Opinion — Judea Pearl @ 4:09 pm

I was privileged to be interviewed recently by David Hand, Professor of Statistics at Imperial College, London, and a former President of the Royal Statistical Society. I would like to share this interview with readers of this blog since many of the questions raised by David keep coming up in my conversations with statisticians and machine learning researchers, both privately and on Twitter.

For me, David represents mainstream statistics and, the reason I find his perspective so valuable is that he does not have a stake in causality and its various formulations. Like most mainstream statisticians, he is simply curious to understand what the big fuss is all about and how to communicate differences among various approaches without taking sides.

So, I’ll let David start, and I hope you find it useful.

Judea Pearl Interview by David Hand

There are some areas of statistics which seem to attract controversy and disagreement, and causal modelling is certainly one of them. In an attempt to understand what all the fuss is about, I asked Judea Pearl about these differences in perspective. Pearl is a world leader in the scientific understanding of causality. He is a recipient of the AMC Turing Award (computing’s “Nobel Prize”), for “fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning”, the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition, and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

QUESTION 1:

I am aware that causal modelling is a hotly contested topic, and that there are alternatives to your perspective – the work of statisticians Don Rubin and Phil Dawid spring to mind, for example. Words like counterfactual, Popperian falsifiability, potential outcomes, appear. I’d like to understand the key differences between the various perspectives, so can you tell me what are the main grounds on which they disagree?

ANSWER 1:

You might be surprised to hear that, despite what seems to be hotly contested debates, there are very few philosophical differences among the various “approaches.” And I put “approaches” in quotes because the differences are more among historical traditions, or “frameworks” than among scientific principles. If we compare, for example, Rubin’s potential outcome with my framework, named “Structural Causal Models” (SCM), we find that the two are logically equivalent; a theorem in one is a theorem in the other and an assumption in one can be written as an assumption in the other. This means that, starting with the same set of assumptions, every solution obtained in one can also be obtained in the other.

But logical equivalence does not means “modeling equivalence” when we consider issues such as transparency, credibility or tractability. The equations for straight lines in polar coordinates are equivalent to those in Cartesian coordinates yet are hardly manageable when it comes to calculating areas of squares or triangles.

In SCM, assumptions are articulated in the form of equations among measured variables, each asserting how one variable responds to changes in another. Graphical models are simple abstractions of those equations and, remarkably, are sufficient for answering many causal questions when applied to non-experimental data. An arrow X—>Y in a graphical model represents the capacity to respond to such changes. All causal relationships are derived mechanically from those qualitative primitives, demanding no further judgment of the modeller.

In Rubin’s framework, assumptions are expressed as conditional independencies among counterfactual variables, also known as “ignorability conditions.” The mental task of ascertaining the plausibility of such assumptions is beyond anyone’s capacity, which makes it extremely hard for researchers to articulate or to verify. For example, the task of deciding which measurements to include in the analysis (or in the propensity score) is intractable in the language of conditional ignorability. Judging whether the assumptions are compatible with the available data, is another task that is trivial in graphical models and insurmountable in the potential outcome framework.

Conceptually, the differences can be summarized thus: The graphical approach goes where scientific knowledge resides, while Rubin’s approach goes where statistical routines need to be justified. The difference shines through when simple problems are solved side by side in both approaches, as in my book Causality (2009). The main reason differences between approaches are still debated in the literature is that most statisticians are watching these debates as outsiders, instead of trying out simple examples from beginning to end. Take for example Simpson’s paradox, a puzzle that has intrigued a century of statisticians and philosophers. It is still as vexing to most statisticians today as it was to Pearson in 1889, and the task of deciding which data to consult, the aggregated or the disaggregated is still avoided by all statistics textbooks.

To summarize, causal modeling, a topic that should be of prime interest to all statisticians, is still perceived to be a “hotly contested topic”, rather than the main frontier of statistical research. The emphasis on “differences between the various perspectives” prevents statisticians from seeing the exciting new capabilities that now avail themselves, and which “enable us to answer questions that we have always wanted but were afraid to ask.” It is hard to tell whether fears of those “differences” prevent statisticians from seeing the excitement, or the other way around, and cultural inhibitions prevent statisticians from appreciating the excitement, and drive them to discuss “differences” instead.

QUESTION 2:

There are different schools of statistics, but I think that most modern pragmatic applied statisticians are rather eclectic, and will choose a method which has the best capability to answer their particular questions. Does the same apply to approaches to causal modelling? That is, do the different perspectives have strengths and weaknesses, and should we be flexible in our choice of approach?

ANSWER 2:

These strengths and weaknesses are seen clearly in the SCM framework, which unifies several approaches and provides a flexible way of leveraging the merits of each. In particular, SCM combines graphical models and potential outcome logic. The graphs are used to encode what we know (i.e., the assumptions we are willing to defend) and the logic is used to encode what we wish to know, that is, the research question of interest. Simple mathematical tools can then combine these two with data and produce consistent estimates.

The availability of these unifying tools now calls on statisticians to become actively involved in causal analysis, rather than attempting to judge approaches from a distance. The choice of approach will become obvious once research questions are asked and the stage is set to articulate subject matter information that is necessary in answering those questions.

QUESTION 3:

To a very great extent the modern big data revolution has been driven by so-called “databased” models and algorithms, where understanding is not necessarily relevant or even helpful, and where there is often no underlying theory about how the variables are related. Rather, the aim is simply to use data to construct a model or algorithm which will predict an outcome from input variables (deep learning neural networks being an illustration). But this approach is intrinsically fragile, relying on an assumption that the data properly represent the population of interest. Causal modelling seems to me to be at the opposite end of the spectrum: it is intrinsically “theory-based”, because it has to begin with a causal model. In your approach, described in an accessible way in your recent book The Book of Why, such models are nicely summarised by your arrow charts. But don’t theory-based models have the complementary risk that they rely heavily on the accuracy of the model? As you say on page 160 of The Book of Why, “provided the model is correct”.

ANSWER 3:

When the tasks are purely predictive, model-based methods are indeed not immediately necessary and deep neural networks perform surprisingly well. This is level-1 (associational) in the Ladder of Causation described in The Book of Why. In tasks involving interventions, however (level-2 of the Ladder), model-based methods become a necessity. There is no way to predict the effect of policy interventions (or treatments) unless we are in possession of either causal assumptions or controlled randomized experiments employing identical interventions. In such tasks, and absent controlled experiments, reliance on the accuracy of the model is inevitable, and the best we can do is to make the model transparent, so that its accuracy can be (1) tested for compatibility with data and/or (2) judged by experts as well as policy makers and/or (3) subjected to sensitivity analysis.

A major reason why statisticians are reluctant to state and rely on untestable modeling assumptions stems from lack of training in managing such assumptions, however plausible. Even stating such unassailable assumptions as “symptoms do not cause diseases” or “drugs do not change patient’s sex” require a vocabulary that is not familiar to the great majority of living statisticians. Things become worse in the potential outcome framework where such assumptions resist intuitive interpretation, let alone judgment of plausibility. It is important at this point to go back and qualify my assertion that causal models are not necessary for purely predictive tasks. Many tasks that, at first glance appear to be predictive, turn out to require causal analysis. A simple example is the problem of external validity or inference across populations. Differences among populations are very similar to differences induced by interventions, hence methods of transporting information from one population to another can leverage all the tools developed for predicting effects of interventions. A similar transfer applies to missing data analysis, traditionally considered a statistical problem. Not so. It is inherently a causal problem since modeling the reason for missingness is crucial for deciding how we can recover from missing data. Indeed modern methods of missing data analysis, employing causal diagrams are able to recover statistical and causal relationships that purely statistical methods have failed to recover.

QUESTION 4:

In a related vein, the “backdoor” and “frontdoor” adjustments and criteria described in the book are very elegant ways of extracting causal information from arrow diagrams. They permit causal information to be obtained from observational data. Provided that is, the arrow diagram accurately represents the relationships between all the relevant variables. So doesn’t valid application of this elegant calculus depends critically on the accuracy of the base diagram?

ANSWER 4:

Of course. But as we have agreed above, EVERY exercise in causal inference “depends critically on the accuracy” of the theoretical assumptions we make. Our choice is whether to make these assumptions transparent, namely, in a form that allows us to scrutinize their veracity, or bury those assumptions in cryptic notation that prevents scrutiny.

In a similar vein, I must modify your opening statement, which described the “backdoor” and “frontdoor” criteria as “elegant ways of extracting causal information from arrow diagrams.” A more accurate description would be “…extracting causal information from rudimentary scientific knowledge.” The diagrammatic description of these criteria enhances, rather than restricts their range of applicability. What these criteria in fact do is extract quantitative causal information from conceptual understanding of the world; arrow diagrams simply represent the extent to which one has or does not have such understanding. Avoiding graphs conceals what knowledge one has, as well as what doubts one entertains.

QUESTION 5:

You say, in The Book of Why (p5-6) that the development of statistics led it to focus “exclusively on how to summarise data, not on how to interpret it.” It’s certainly true that when the Royal Statistical Society was established it focused on “procuring, arranging, and publishing ‘Facts calculated to illustrate the Condition and Prospects of Society’,” and said that “the first and most essential rule of its conduct [will be] to exclude carefully all Opinions from its transactions and publications.” But that was in the 1830s, and things have moved on since then. Indeed, to take one example, clinical trials were developed in the first half of the Twentieth Century and have a history stretching back even further. The discipline might have been slow to get off the ground in tackling causal matters, but surely things have changed and a very great deal of modern statistics is directly concerned with causal matters – think of risk factors in epidemiology or manipulation in experiments, for example. So aren’t you being a little unfair to the modern discipline?

ANSWER 5:

Ronald Fisher’s manifesto, in which he pronounced that “the object of statistical methods is the reduction of data” was published in 1922, not in the 19th century (Fisher 1922). Data produced in clinical trials have been the only data that statisticians recognize as legitimate carriers of causal information, and our book devotes a whole chapter to this development. With the exception of this singularity, however, the bulk of mainstream statistics has been glaringly disinterested in causal matters. And I base this observation on three faithful indicators: statistics textbooks, curricula at major statistics departments, and published texts of Presidential Addresses in the past two decades. None of these sources can convince us that causality is central to statistics.

Take any book on the history of statistics, and check if it considers causal analysis to be of primary concern to the leading players in 20th century statistics. For example, Stigler’s The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom (2016) barely makes a passing remark to two (hardly known) publications in causal analysis.

I am glad you mentioned epidemiologists’ analysis of risk factors as an example of modern interest in causal questions. Unfortunately, epidemiology is not representative of modern statistics. In fact epidemiology is the one field where causal diagrams have become a second language, contrary to mainstream statistics, where causal diagrams are still a taboo. (e.g., Efron and Hastie 2016; Gelman and Hill, 2007; Imbens and Rubin 2015; Witte and Witte, 2017).

When an academic colleague asks me “Aren’t you being a little unfair to our discipline, considering the work of so and so?”, my answer is “Must we speculate on what ‘so and so’ did? Can we discuss the causal question that YOU have addressed in class in the past year?” The conversation immediately turns realistic.

QUESTION 6:

Isn’t the notion of intervening through randomisation still the gold standard for establishing causality?

ANSWER 6:

It is. Although in practice, the hegemony of randomized trial is being contested by alternatives. Randomized trials suffer from incurable problems such as selection bias (recruited subject are rarely representative of the target population) and lack of transportability (results are not applicable when populations change). The new calculus of causation helps us overcome these problems, thus achieving greater over all credibility; after all, observational studies are conducted at the natural habitat of the target population.

QUESTION 7:

What would you say are the three most important ideas in your approach? And what, in particular, would you like readers of The Book of Why to take away from the book.

ANSWER 7:

The three most important ideas in the book are: (1) Causal analysis is easy, but requires causal assumptions (or experiments) and those assumptions require a new mathematical notation, and a new calculus. (2) The Ladder of Causation, consisting of (i) association (ii) interventions and (iii) counterfactuals, is the Rosetta Stone of causal analysis. To answer a question at layer (x) we must have assumptions at level (x) or higher. (3) Counterfactuals emerge organically from basic scientific knowledge and, when represented in graphs, yield transparency, testability and a powerful calculus of cause and effect. I must add a fourth take away: (4) To appreciate what modern causal analysis can do for you, solve one toy problem from beginning to end; it would tell you more about statistics and causality than dozens of scholarly articles laboring to overview statistics and causality.

REFERENCES

Efron, B. and Hastie, T., Computer Age Statistical Inference: Algorithms, Evidence, and Data Science, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Fisher, R., “On the mathematical foundations of theoretical statistics,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A 222, 311, 1922.

Gelman, A. and Hill, J., Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Imbens, G.W. and Rubin, D.B., Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences: An Introduction, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Witte, R.S. and Witte, J.S., Statistics, 11th edition, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2017.

January 29, 2020

On Imbens’s Comparison of Two Approaches to Empirical Economics

Filed under: Counterfactual,d-separation,DAGs,do-calculus,Imbens — judea @ 11:00 pm

Many readers have asked for my reaction to Guido Imbens’s recent paper, titled, “Potential Outcome and Directed Acyclic Graph Approaches to Causality: Relevance for Empirical Practice in Economics,” arXiv.19071v1 [stat.ME] 16 Jul 2019.

The note below offers brief comments on Imbens’s five major claims regarding the superiority of potential outcomes [PO] vis a vis directed acyclic graphs [DAGs].

These five claims are articulated in Imbens’s introduction (pages 1-3). [Quoting]:

” … there are five features of the PO framework that may be behind its current popularity in economics.”

I will address them sequentially, first quoting Imbens’s claims, then offering my counterclaims.

I will end with a comment on Imbens’s final observation, concerning the absence of empirical evidence in a “realistic setting” to demonstrate the merits of the DAG approach.

Before we start, however, let me clarify that there is no such thing as a “DAG approach.” Researchers using DAGs follow an approach called  Structural Causal Model (SCM), which consists of functional relationships among variables of interest, and of which DAGs are merely a qualitative abstraction, spelling out the arguments in each function. The resulting graph can then be used to support inference tools such as d-separation and do-calculus. Potential outcomes are relationships derived from the structural model and several of their properties can be elucidated using DAGs. These interesting relationships are summarized in chapter 7 of (Pearl, 2009a) and in a Statistical Survey overview (Pearl, 2009c)


Imbens’s Claim # 1
“First, there are some assumptions that are easily captured in the PO framework relative to the DAG approach, and these assumptions are critical in many identification strategies in economics. Such assumptions include
monotonicity ([Imbens and Angrist, 1994]) and other shape restrictions such as convexity or concavity ([Matzkin et al.,1991, Chetverikov, Santos, and Shaikh, 2018, Chen, Chernozhukov, Fernández-Val, Kostyshak, and Luo, 2018]). The instrumental variables setting is a prominent example, and I will discuss it in detail in Section 4.2.”

Pearl’s Counterclaim # 1
It is logically impossible for an assumption to be “easily captured in the PO framework” and not simultaneously be “easily captured” in the “DAG approach.” The reason is simply that the latter embraces the former and merely enriches it with graph-based tools. Specifically, SCM embraces the counterfactual notation Yx that PO deploys, and does not exclude any concept or relationship definable in the PO approach.

Take monotonicity, for example. In PO, monotonicity is expressed as

Yx (u) ≥ Yx’ (u) for all u and all x > x’

In the DAG approach it is expressed as:

Yx (u) ≥ Yx’ (u) for all u and all x > x’

(Taken from Causality pages 291, 294, 398.)

The two are identical, of course, which may seem surprising to PO folks, but not to DAG folks who know how to derive the counterfactuals Yx from structural models. In fact, the derivation of counterfactuals in
terms of structural equations (Balke and Pearl, 1994) is considered one of the fundamental laws of causation in the SCM framework see (Bareinboim and Pearl, 2016) and (Pearl, 2015).

Imbens’s Claim # 2
“Second, the potential outcomes in the PO framework connect easily to traditional approaches to economic models such as supply and demand settings where potential outcome functions are the natural primitives. Related to this, the insistence of the PO approach on manipulability of the causes, and its attendant distinction between non-causal attributes and causal variables has resonated well with the focus in empirical work on policy relevance ([Angrist and Pischke, 2008, Manski, 2013]).”

Pearl’s Counterclaim #2
Not so. The term “potential outcome” is a late comer to the economics literature of the 20th century, whose native vocabulary and natural primitives were functional relationships among variables, not potential outcomes. The latters are defined in terms of a “treatment assignment” and hypothetical outcome, while the formers invoke only observable variables like “supply” and “demand”. Don Rubin cited this fundamental difference as sufficient reason for shunning structural equation models, which he labeled “bad science.”

While it is possible to give PO interpretation to structural equations, the interpretation is both artificial and convoluted, especially in view of PO insistence on manipulability of causes. Haavelmo, Koopman and Marschak would not hesitate for a moment to write the structural equation:

Damage = f (earthquake intensity, other factors).

PO researchers, on the other hand, would spend weeks debating whether earthquakes have “treatment assignments” and whether we can legitimately estimate the “causal effects” of earthquakes. Thus, what Imbens perceives as a helpful distinction is, in fact, an unnecessary restriction that suppresses natural scientific discourse. See also (Pearl, 2018; 2019).

Imbens’s Claim #3
“Third, many of the currently popular identification strategies focus on models with relatively few (sets of) variables, where identification questions have been worked out once and for all.”

Pearl’s Counterclaim #3

First, I would argue that this claim is actually false. Most IV strategies that economists use are valid “conditional on controls” (see examples listed in Imbens (2014))  and the criterion that distinguishes “good controls” from “bad controls” is not trivial to articulate without the help of graphs. (See, A Crash Course in Good and Bad Control). It can certainly not be discerned “once and for all”.

Second, even if economists are lucky to guess “good controls,” it is still unclear whether they focus  on relatively few variables because, lacking graphs, they cannot handle more variables, or do they refrain from using graphs to hide the opportunities missed by focusing on few pre-fabricated, “once and for all” identification strategies.

I believe both apprehensions play a role in perpetuating the graph-avoiding subculture among economists. I have elaborated on this question here: (Pearl, 2014).

Imbens’s Claim # 4
“Fourth, the PO framework lends itself well to accounting for treatment effect heterogeneity in estimands ([Imbens and Angrist, 1994, Sekhon and Shem-Tov, 2017]) and incorporating such heterogeneity in estimation and the design of optimal policy functions ([Athey and Wager, 2017, Athey, Tibshirani, Wager, et al., 2019, Kitagawa and Tetenov, 2015]).”

Pearl’s Counterclaim #4
Indeed, in the early 1990s, economists felt ecstatic liberating themselves from the linear tradition of structural equation models and finding a framework (PO) that allowed them to model treatment effect heterogeneity.

However, whatever role treatment heterogeneity played in this excitement should have been amplified ten-fold in 1995, when completely non parametric structural equation models came into being, in which non-linear interactions and heterogeneity were assumed a priori. Indeed, the tools developed in the econometric literature cover only a fraction of the treatment-heterogeneity tasks that are currently managed by SCM. In particular, the latter includes such problems as “necessary and sufficient” causation, mediation, external validity, selection bias and more.

Speaking more generally, I find it odd for a discipline to prefer an “approach” that rejects tools over one that invites and embraces tools.

Imbens’s claim #5
“Fifth, the PO approach has traditionally connected well with design, estimation, and inference questions. From the outset Rubin and his coauthors provided much guidance to researchers and policy makers for practical implementation including inference, with the work on the propensity score ([Rosenbaum and Rubin, 1983b]) an influential example.”

Pearl’s Counterclaim #5
The initial work of Rubin and his co-authors has indeed provided much needed guidance to researchers and policy makers who were in a state of desperation, having no other mathematical notation to express causal questions of interest. That happened because economists were not aware of the counterfactual content of structural equation models, and of the non-parametric extension of those models.

Unfortunately, the clumsy and opaque notation introduced in this initial work has become a ritual in the PO framework that has prevailed, and the refusal to commence the analysis with meaningful assumptions has led to several blunders and misconceptions. One such misconception has been propensity score analysis which researchers have taken as a tool for reducing confounding bias. I have elaborated on this misguidance in Causality, Section 11.3.5, “Understanding Propensity Scores” (Pearl, 2009a).

Imbens’s final observation: Empirical Evidence
“Separate from the theoretical merits of the two approaches, another reason for the lack of adoption in economics is that the DAG literature has not shown much evidence of the benefits for empirical practice in settings that are important in economics. The potential outcome studies in MACE, and the chapters in [Rosenbaum, 2017], CISSB and MHE have detailed empirical examples of the various identification strategies proposed. In realistic settings they demonstrate the merits of the proposed methods and describe in detail the corresponding estimation and inference methods. In contrast in the DAG literature, TBOW, [Pearl, 2000], and [Peters, Janzing, and Schölkopf, 2017] have no substantive empirical examples, focusing largely on identification questions in what TBOW refers to as “toy” models. Compare the lack of impact of the DAG literature in economics with the recent embrace of regression discontinuity designs imported from the psychology literature, or with the current rapid spread of the machine learning methods from computer science, or the recent quick adoption of synthetic control methods [Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller, 2010]. All came with multiple concrete examples that highlighted their benefits over traditional methods. In the absence of such concrete examples the toy models in the DAG literature sometimes appear to be a set of solutions in search of problems, rather than a set of solutions for substantive problems previously posed in social sciences.”

Pearl’s comments on: Empirical Evidence
There is much truth to Imbens’s observation. The PO excitement that swept natural experimentalists in the 1990s came with outright rejection of graphical models. The hundreds, if not thousands, of empirical economists who plunged into empirical work, were warned repeatedly that graphical models may be “ill-defined,” “deceptive,” and “confusing,” and structural models have no scientific underpinning (see (Pearl, 19952009b)). Not a single paper in the econometric literature has acknowledged the existence of SCM as an alternative or complementary approach to PO.

The result has been the exact opposite of what has taken place in epidemiology where DAGs became a second language to both scholars and field workers, [Due in part to the influential 1999 paper by Greenland, Pearl and Robins.] In contrast, PO-led economists have launched a massive array of experimental programs lacking graphical tools for guidance. I would liken it to a Phoenician armada exploring the Atlantic coast in leaky boats and no compass to guide its way.

This depiction might seem pretentious and overly critical, considering the pride with which natural experimentalists take in the results of their studies (though no objective verification of validity can be undertaken.) Yet looking back at the substantive empirical examples listed by Imbens, one cannot but wonder how much more credible those studies could have been with graphical tools to guide the way. These include a friendly language to communicate assumptions, powerful means to test their implications, and ample opportunities to uncover new natural experiments (Brito and Pearl, 2002).

Summary and Recommendation 

The thrust of my reaction to Imbens’s article is simple:

It is unreasonable to prefer an “approach” that rejects tools over one that invites and embraces tools.

Technical comparisons of the PO and SCM approaches, using concrete examples, have been published since 1993 in dozens of articles and books in computer science, statistics, epidemiology, and social science, yet none in the econometric literature. Economics students are systematically deprived of even the most elementary graphical tools available to other researchers, for example, to determine if one variable is independent of another given a third, or if a variable is a valid IV given a set S of observed variables.

This avoidance can no longer be justified by appealing to “We have not found this [graphical] approach to aid the drawing of causal inferences” (Imbens and Rubin, 2015, page 25).

To open an effective dialogue and a genuine comparison between the two approaches, I call on Professor Imbens to assume leadership in his capacity as Editor in Chief of Econometrica and invite a comprehensive survey paper on graphical methods for the front page of his Journal. This is how creative editors move their fields forward.

References
Balke, A. and Pearl, J. “Probabilistic Evaluation of Counterfactual Queries,” In Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Seattle, WA, Volume I, 230-237, July 31 – August 4, 1994.

Brito, C. and Pearl, J. “General instrumental variables,” In A. Darwiche and N. Friedman (Eds.), Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference, Morgan Kaufmann: San Francisco, CA, 85-93, August 2002.

Bareinboim, E. and Pearl, J. “Causal inference and the data-fusion problem,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(27): 7345-7352, 2016.

Greenland, S., Pearl, J., and Robins, J. “Causal diagrams for epidemiologic research,” Epidemiology, Vol. 1, No. 10, pp. 37-48, January 1999.

Imbens, G. “Potential Outcome and Directed Acyclic Graph Approaches to Causality: Relevance for Empirical Practice in Economics,” arXiv.19071v1 [stat.ME] 16 Jul 2019.

Imbens, G. and Rubin, D. Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences: An Introduction. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press; 2015.

Imbens, Guido W. Instrumental Variables: An Econometrician’s Perspective. Statist. Sci. 29 (2014), no. 3, 323–358. doi:10.1214/14-STS480. https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1411437513

Pearl, J. “Causal diagrams for empirical research,” (With Discussions), Biometrika, 82(4): 669-710, 1995.

Pearl, J. “Understanding Propensity Scores” in J. Pearl’s Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, Section 11.3.5, Second edition, NY: Cambridge University Press, pp. 348-352, 2009a.

Pearl, J. “Myth, confusion, and science in causal analysis,” University of California, Los Angeles, Computer Science Department, Technical Report R-348, May 2009b.

Pearl, J. “Causal inference in statistics: An overview”  Statistics Surveys, Vol. 3, 96–146, 2009c.


Pearl, J. “Are economists smarter than epidemiologists? (Comments on Imbens’s recent paper),” Causal Analysis in Theory and Practice Blog, October 27, 2014.

Pearl, J. “Trygve Haavelmo and the Emergence of Causal Calculus,” Econometric Theory, 31: 152-179, 2015.

Pearl, J. “Does obesity shorten life? Or is it the Soda? On non-manipulable causes,” Journal of Causal Inference, Causal, Casual, and Curious Section, 6(2), online, September 2018.

Pearl, J. “On the interpretation of do(x),” Journal of Causal Inference, Causal, Casual, and Curious Section, 7(1), online, March 2019.

January 24, 2018

Can DAGs Do the Un-doable?

Filed under: DAGs,Discussion — Judea Pearl @ 2:32 am

The following question was sent to us by Igor Mandel:

Separation of variables with zero causal coefficients from others
Here is a problem. Imagine, we have a researcher who has some understanding of the particular problem, and this understanding is partly or completely wrong. Can DAG or other (if any) causality theory convincingly establish this fact (that she is wrong)?

To be more specific, let’s consider a simple example with kind of undisputable causal variables (described in details in https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2984045 ). One wants to estimate, how different food’s ingredients affect the energy (in calories) containing in different types of food. She takes many samples and measures different things. But she doesn’t know about existence of the fats and proteins – yet she knows, that there are carbohydrates, water and fiber. She builds a respective DAG, how she feels it should be:

From our (i.e. educated people of 21st century) standpoint the arrows from Fiber and Water to Calories have zero coefficients. But since data bear significant correlations between Calories, Water and Fiber – any regression estimates would show non-zero values for these coefficients. Is there way to say, that these non-zero values are wrong, not just quantitatively, but kind of qualitatively?
Even brighter example of what is often called “spurious correlation”. It was “statistically proven” almost 20 years ago, that storks deliver babies ( http://robertmatthews.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/RM-storks-paper.pdf ) – while many women still believe they do not. How to reconvince those statistically ignorant women? Or – how to strengthen their naïve, but statistically not confirmed beliefs, just looking at the data and not asking them for some babies related details? What kind of DAG may help?

My Response
This question, in a variety of settings, has been asked by readers of this blog since the beginning of the Causal Revolution. The idea that new tools are now available that can handle causal problems free of statistical dogmas has encouraged thousands of researchers to ask: Can you do this, or can you do that? The answers to such questions are often trivial, and can be obtained directly from the logic of causal inference, without the details of the question. I am not surprised however that such questions surface again, in 2018, since the foundations of causal inference are rarely emphasized in the technical literature, so they tend to be forgotten.

I will answer Igor’s question as a student of modern logic of causation.

1. Can a DAG distinguish variables with zero causal effects (on Y) from those having non-zero effects.

Of course not, no method in the world can do that without further assumption. Here is why:
The question above concerns causal relations. We know from first principle that no causal query can be answered from data alone, without causal information that lies outside the data.
QED
[It does not matter if your query is quantitative or qualitative, if you address it to a story or to a graph. Every causal query needs causal assumptions. No causes in – no causes out (N. Cartwright)]

2. Can DAG-based methods do anything more than just quit with failure?

Of course they can.

2.1 First notice that the distinction between having or not having causal effect is a property of nature, (or the data generating process), not of the model that you postulate. We can therefore ignore the diagram that Igor describes above. Now, in addition to quitting for lack of information, DAG-based methods would tell you: “If you can give me some causal information, however qualitative, I will tell you if it is sufficient or not for answering your query.” I hope readers would agree with me that this kind of an answer, though weaker than the one expected by the naïve inquirer, is much more informative than just quitting in despair.

2.2 Note also that postulating a whimsical model like the one described by Igor above has no bearing on the answer. To do anything useful in causal inference we need to start with a model of reality, not with a model drawn by a confused researcher, for whom an arrow is nothing more than “data bears significant correlation” or “regression estimates show non-zero values.”

2.3 Once you start with a postulated model of reality, DAG-based methods can be very helpful. For example, they can take your postulated model and determine which of the arrows in the model should have a zero coefficient attached to it, which should have a non-zero coefficient attached to it, and which would remain undecided till the end of time.

2.4 Moreover, assume reality is governed by model M1 and you postulate model M2, different from M1. DAG-based methods can tell you which causal query you will answer correctly and which you will
answer incorrectly. (see section 4.3 of http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r459-reprint-errata.pdf ). This is nice, because it offers us a kind of sensitivity analysis: how far should reality be from your assumed model before you will start making mistakes?

2.5 Finally, DAG-based methods identify for us the testable implication of our model, so that we can test models for compatibility with data.

I am glad Igor raised the question that he did. There is a tendency to forget fundamentals, and it is healthy to rehearse them periodically.

– Judea

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