论文标题
交换性在因果推理中的作用
The role of exchangeability in causal inference
论文作者
论文摘要
尽管在因果推论文献中以各种措施讨论了交换性的概念，但它很少将其原始含义作为概率分布的对称属性。由于该特性是贝叶斯推断的标准组成部分，因此我们认为在贝叶斯因果推断中，将因果模型联系起来是很自然的，包括混杂的概念和感兴趣的因果对比的概念，与交换性的概念联系起来。在这里，我们提出了概率间交换性能作为因果效应的识别条件，将其与不满足的推论（通常使用潜在结果指定）相关联（通常说明），并在具有后验预期的期望值方面定义了因果关系，以实现可交换的可交换单元。虽然我们的主要重点是要点治疗环境，但我们还研究了这种推理如何延续到纵向环境中。
Though the notion of exchangeability has been discussed in the causal inference literature under various guises, it has rarely taken its original meaning as a symmetry property of probability distributions. As this property is a standard component of Bayesian inference, we argue that in Bayesian causal inference it is natural to link the causal model, including the notion of confounding and definition of causal contrasts of interest, to the concept of exchangeability. Here we propose a probabilistic between-group exchangeability property as an identifying condition for causal effects, relate it to alternative conditions for unconfounded inferences (commonly stated using potential outcomes) and define causal contrasts in the presence of exchangeability in terms of posterior predictive expectations for further exchangeable units. While our main focus is on a point treatment setting, we also investigate how this reasoning carries over to longitudinal settings.
