Temporal Causal Reasoning with (Non-Recursive) Structural Equation Models
Authors: Maksim Gladyshev, Natasha Alechina, Mehdi Dastani, Dragan Doder, Brian Logan
AAAI 2025 | Venue PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details
| Reproducibility Variable | Result | LLM Response |
|---|---|---|
| Research Type | Theoretical | In this paper we propose a new interpretation of SEMs when reasoning about Actual Causality, in which SEMs are viewed as mechanisms transforming the dynamics of exogenous variables into the dynamics of endogenous variables. This allows us to combine counterfactual causal reasoning with existing temporal logic formalisms, and to introduce a temporal logic, CPLTL, for causal reasoning about such structures. We show that the standard restriction to so-called recursive models (with no cycles in the dependency graph) is not necessary in our approach, allowing us to reason about mutually dependent processes and feedback loops. Finally, we introduce new notions of model equivalence for temporal causal models, and show that CPLTL has an efficient model-checking procedure. |
| Researcher Affiliation | Academia | 1 Utrecht University, The Netherlands 2 Open Universiteit, The Netherlands 3 University of Aberdeen, UK |
| Pseudocode | Yes | Algorithm 1: Computing C Y ( n) y of (M, u, v, Y ( n) y), type of u is (n,m) |
| Open Source Code | No | No explicit statement or link for open-source code for the methodology described in this paper was found. |
| Open Datasets | No | The paper illustrates its concepts with examples like 'Example 1 (Rocks)', 'Example 2 (Treatment)', and 'Example 3 (Deadline)' rather than using specific public datasets for empirical evaluation. |
| Dataset Splits | No | The paper does not describe experiments that use external datasets, and therefore no information about dataset splits is provided. |
| Hardware Specification | No | The paper focuses on theoretical contributions and does not describe experiments that would require specific hardware specifications. |
| Software Dependencies | No | The paper mentions using 'a PLTL path model-checker (Markey 2002)' as part of the theoretical model-checking procedure, but it does not specify any software dependencies with version numbers for empirical reproduction of experiments. |
| Experiment Setup | No | The paper describes a theoretical framework and does not include details on experimental setup, hyperparameters, or training configurations. |