Identifying Causal Effects Under Functional Dependencies.

Abstract

We study the identification of causal effects, motivated by two improvements to identifiability that can be attained if one knows that some variables in a causal graph are functionally determined by their parents (without needing to know the specific functions). First, an unidentifiable causal effect may become identifiable when certain variables are functional. Secondly, certain functional variables can be excluded from being observed without affecting the identifiability of a causal effect, which may significantly reduce the number of needed variables in observational data. Our results are largely based on an elimination procedure that removes functional variables from a causal graph while preserving key properties in the resulting causal graph, including the identifiability of causal effects. Our treatment of functional dependencies in this context mandates a formal, systematic, and general treatment of positivity assumptions, which are prevalent in the literature on causal effect identifiability and which interact with functional dependencies, leading to another contribution of the presented work.