The Inflation Technique for Causal Inference with Latent Variables

Understand

The problem of causal inference is to determine if a given probability distribution on observed variables is compatible with some causal structure.

• The difficult case is when the causal structure includes latent variables.
• We here introduce the $\textit{inflation technique}$ for tackling this problem.
• An inflation of a causal structure is a new causal structure that can contain multiple copies of each of the original variables, but where the ancestry of each copy mirrors that of the original.