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Interventions and Causal Inference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Frederick Eberhardt  and
Richard Scheines
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Abstract

The literature on causal discovery has focused on interventions that involve randomly assigning values to a single variable. But such a randomized intervention is not the only possibility, nor is it always optimal. In some cases it is impossible or it would be unethical to perform such an intervention. We provide an account of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ interventions and discuss what they can contribute to causal discovery. We also describe how the choice of the optimal intervention(s) depends heavily on the particular experimental setup and the assumptions that can be made.

Type
Philosophy of Science: Causation
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 74 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2006 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers. Edited by Cristina Bicchieri and Jason Alexander , December 2007 , pp. 981 - 995
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

The first author is funded by the Causal Learning Collaborative Initiative supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation. Many aspects of this paper were inspired by discussions with members of the collaborative.

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