Causal Analysis in Theory and Practice

May 8, 2006

Identifying conditional plans

Filed under: Book (J Pearl),Plans — moderator @ 12:00 am

Section 4.2 of the book (p. 113) gives an identification condition and estimation formula for the effect of a conditional action, namely, the effect of an action do(X=g(z)) where Z is a measurement taken prior to the action. Is this equation generalizable to the case of several actions, i.e., conditional plan?

The difficulty seen is that this formula was derived on the assumption that X does not change the value of Z. However, in a multi-action plan, some actions in X could change observations Z that are used to guide future actions. We do not have notation for distinguishing post-intevention from pre-intevention observations.

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