将因果效应分析从变量层面细化到事件层面,提升对复杂数据的因果理解。
A fine-grained look at causal effects in causal spaces
- 在测度论框架下,以事件为单位定义因果效应存在性
- 提出可量化因果效应强度与性质的新度量方法
- 适用于图像、语言等高维数据的精细因果分析
因果效应是众多科学领域的核心概念。传统上,定量研究关注变量间的因果关系,例如某种药物剂量(W)如何影响患者血压(Y)。然而,在现代数据领域(如图像像素或语言模型中的词元),原始变量缺乏语义结构,难以提出有意义的因果问题。本文提出一种更细粒度的视角:在概率论启发下,将因果效应研究对象从变量转向事件。基于最近提出的因果空间测度论框架,我们引入多个二元定义以判断因果效应是否存在,并证明其与干预测度下(不)独立性的关联性质。进一步,我们构建了捕捉事件层面因果效应强度与性质的量化度量,表明常见处理效应度量可作为特例被还原。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The notion of causal effect is fundamental across many scientific disciplines. Traditionally, quantitative researchers have studied causal effects at the level of variables; for example, how a certain drug dose (W) causally affects a patient's blood pressure (Y). However, in many modern data domains, the raw variables-such as pixels in an image or tokens in a language model-do not have the semantic structure needed to formulate meaningful causal questions. In this paper, we offer a more fine-grained perspective by studying causal effects at the level of events, drawing inspiration from probability theory, where core notions such as independence are first given for events and sigma-algebras, before random variables enter the picture. Within the measure-theoretic framework of causal spaces, a recently introduced axiomatisation of causality, we first introduce several binary definitions that determine whether a causal effect is present, as well as proving some properties of them linking causal effect to (in)dependence under an intervention measure. Further, we provide quantifying measures that capture the strength and nature of causal effects on events, and show that we can recover the common measures of treatment effect as special cases.
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