A Graphical Criterion for the Identification of Causal Effects in Linear Models

摘要

This paper concerns the assessment of direct causal effects from a combination of: (ⅰ) non-experimental data, and (ⅱ) qualitative domain knowledge. Domain knowledge is encoded in the form of a directed acyclic graph (DAG), in which all interactions are assumed linear, and some variables are presumed to be unobserved. The paper establishes a sufficient criterion for the identifiability of all causal effects in such models as well as a procedure for estimating the causal effects from the observed covariance matrix.