Understand
Intervention theories of causality define a relationship as causal if appropriately specified interventions to manipulate a putative cause tend to produce changes in the putative effect.
- Interventionist causal theories are commonly formalized by using directed graphs to represent causal relationships, local probability models to quantify the relationship between cause and effect, and a special kind of conditioning operator to represent the effects of interventions.
- Such a formal model represents a family of joint probability distributions, one for each allowable intervention policy.
- This paper interprets the von Neumann formalization of quantum theory as an interventionist theory of causality, describes its relationship to interventionist theories popular in the artificial intelligence literature, and presents a new family of graphical models that extends causal Bayesian networks to quantum systems.