The Inflation Technique Completely Solves the Causal Compatibility Problem

Understand

The causal compatibility question asks whether a given causal structure graph -- possibly involving latent variables -- constitutes a genuinely plausible causal explanation for a given probability distribution over the graph's observed variables.

• Algorithms predicated on merely necessary constraints for causal compatibility typically suffer from false negatives, i.e.
• they admit incompatible distributions as apparently compatible with the given graph.
• In [arXiv:1609.00672], one of us introduced the inflation technique for formulating useful relaxations of the causal compatibility problem in terms of linear programming.