Probabilistic Reasoning Across the Causal Hierarchy
Duligur Ibeling, Thomas Icard
Abstract
We propose a formalization of the three-tier causal hierarchy of association, intervention, and counterfactuals as a series of probabilistic logical languages. Our languages are of strictly increasing expressivity, the first capable of expressing quantitative probabilistic reasoning—including conditional independence and Bayesian inference—the second encoding do-calculus reasoning for causal effects, and the third capturing a fully expressive do-calculus for arbitrary counterfactual queries. We give a corresponding series of finitary axiomatizations complete over both structural causal models and probabilistic programs, and show that satisfiability and validity for each language are decidable in polynomial space.
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Cited by top-tier papers11
- Counterfactual Identifiability of Bijective Causal ModelsArash Nasr-Esfahany, Mohammad Alizadeh, Devavrat ShahICML 2023 · 42 citations
- Comparing Causal Frameworks: Potential Outcomes, Structural Models, Graphs, and AbstractionsDuligur Ibeling, Thomas IcardNeurIPS 2023 · 27 citations
- Neural Causal AbstractionsKevin Xia, Elias BareinboimAAAI 2024 · 17 citations
- A Topological Perspective on Causal InferenceDuligur Ibeling, Thomas IcardNeurIPS 2021 · 12 citations
- A Measure-Theoretic Axiomatisation of CausalityJunhyung Park, Simon Buchholz, Bernhard Schölkopf, Krikamol MuandetNeurIPS 2023 · 11 citations
Builds on1
Related papers
- From Probability to Counterfactuals: the Increasing Complexity of Satisfiability in Pearl's Causal HierarchyJulian Dörfler, Benito van der Zander, Markus Bläser, Maciej LiskiewiczICLR 2025 · 1 citation
- A Hierarchy of Graphical Models for Counterfactual InferencesHongshuo Yang, Elias BareinboimNeurIPS 2025 · 1 citation
- Counterfactual Graphical Models: Constraints and InferenceJuan D. Correa, Elias BareinboimICML 2025
- Universal Causal Inference in a ToposSridhar MahadevanNeurIPS 2025 · 4 citations
- Gateways to Tractability for Satisfiability in Pearl’s Causal HierarchyRobert Ganian, Marlene Gründel, Simon WiethegerICML 2026
