Identifying Conditional Causal Effects

Abstract

This paper concerns the assessment of the effects of actions from a combination of nonexperimental data and causal assumptions encoded in the form of a directed acyclic graph in which some variables are presumed to be unobserved. We provide a procedure that systematically identifies cause effects between two sets of variables conditioned on some other variables, in time polynomial in the number of variables in the graph. The identifiable conditional causal effects are expressed in terms of the observed joint distribution.