Guest editorial: Marco Somalvico memorial issue

摘要

This journal issue, which pays tribute to the memory of Marco Somalvico, is part of a broader initiative, encompassing several journals, that each devoted to him a special issue. This is the result of a coordinated effort, and every different journal issue has its own specific profile. The issue of Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence you are holding only includes three articles, but they are dense, and provide an in-depth treatment of their respective subjects.rnYimin Huang and Marco Valtorta develop the mathematics of an identifiability problem in causal Bayesian networks. A causal Bayesian network consists of a causalrngraph, an acyclic directed graph expressing causal relationships, and a probability distribution respecting the independence relation encoded by the graph. Because of the existence of unmeasured variables, the following identifiability questions arise: "Can we assess the strength of causal effects from nonexperimental data and casual relationships? And if we can, what is the total causal effect in terms of estimable quantities?" Or then, "Is it possible to compute the probability of some set of (effect) variables given intervention on another set of (intervention) variables, in the presence of non-observable (i.e., hidden or latent) variables?"