Identifiability of direct effects from summary causal graphs
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Dynamic structural causal models (SCMs) are a powerful framework for reasoning in dynamic systems about direct effects which measure how a change in one variable affects another variable while holding all other variables constant. The causal relations in a dynamic structural causal model can be qualitatively represented with a full-time causal graph. Assuming linearity and causal sufficiency and given the full-time causal graph, the direct causal effect is always identifiable and can be estimated from data by adjusting on any set of variables given by the so-called single-door criterion. However, in many application such a graph is not available for various reasons but nevertheless experts have access to an abstraction of the full-time causal graph which represents causal relations between time series while omitting temporal information. This paper presents a complete identifiability result which characterizes all cases for which the direct effect is graphically identifiable from summary causal graphs and gives two sound finite adjustment sets that can be used to estimate the direct effect whenever it is identifiable.
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