The Do-Calculus Revisited

Understand

The do-calculus was developed in 1995 to facilitate the identification of causal effects in non-parametric models.

• The completeness proofs of [Huang and Valtorta, 2006] and [Shpitser and Pearl, 2006] and the graphical criteria of [Tian and Shpitser, 2010] have laid this identification problem to rest.
• Recent explorations unveil the usefulness of the do-calculus in three additional areas: mediation analysis [Pearl, 2012], transportability [Pearl and Bareinboim, 2011] and metasynthesis.
• Meta-synthesis (freshly coined) is the task of fusing empirical results from several diverse studies, conducted on heterogeneous populations and under different conditions, so as to synthesize an estimate of a causal relation in some target environment, potentially different from those under study.