Do-Calculus (p213)

Authors: Aymen Merrouche and Pierre-Henri Wuillemin.

This notebook follows the example from “The Book Of Why” (Pearl, 2018) chapter 7 page 213

import pyagrum as gum
import pyagrum.lib.notebook as gnb

import pyagrum.causal as csl
import pyagrum.causal.notebook as cslnb

the causal diagram

The corresponding causal diagram is the following: > We’re facing the following situation and we want to measure the causal effect of \(X\) on \(Y\):

fd = gum.fastBN("w->z->x->y;w->x;w->y")
fd

We suspect the presence of some unmeasured confounders, that could explain the correlation between \(W\) and \(X\) and between \(W\) and \(Y\):

fdModele = csl.CausalModel(fd, [("u1", ["w", "x"]), ("u2", ["w", "y"])], False)
# (<latent variable name>, <list of affected variables’ ids>).
gnb.show(fdModele)

Even with two umeasured confounders :

• We can measure the causal effect of \(Z\) on \(Y\) using the back-door adjustment:

print(" + Back-door doing Z on Y :" + str(fdModele.backDoor("z", "y")))

 + Back-door doing Z on Y :{'w'}

• We can measure the causal effect of \(W\) on \(X\) using the front-door formula:

print(" + Front-door doing W on X :" + str(fdModele.frontDoor("w", "x")))

 + Front-door doing W on X :{'z'}

• In order to measure the causal effect of \(X\) on \(Y\), we can use neither the back-door adjustment nor the front-door formula:

print(" + Backdoor doing X on Y :" + str(fdModele.backDoor("x", "y")))
print(" + Frontdoor doing X on Y :" + str(fdModele.frontDoor("x", "y")))

 + Backdoor doing X on Y :None
 + Frontdoor doing X on Y :None

• In this case, the only way to measure the causal effect of \(X\) on \(Y\) is to use the do-calculus:

cslnb.showCausalImpact(fdModele, on="y", doing="x")

Causal Model

$$ \begin{equation*}P( y \mid \text{do}(x)) = \frac {\sum_{w}{P\left(y\mid w,x,z\right) \cdot P\left(x\mid w,z\right) \cdot P\left(w\right)}}{\sum_{w,y'}{P\left(y'\mid w,x,z\right) \cdot P\left(x\mid w,z\right) \cdot P\left(w\right)}}\end{equation*} $$
Explanation : Do-calculus computations

		y
z	x	0	1
0	0	0.3533	0.6467
	1	0.6584	0.3416
1	0	0.3571	0.6429
	1	0.6334	0.3666

Impact