Title :
Identifiability of causal effects in a multi-agent causal model
Author :
Maes, Sam ; Reumers, Joke ; Manderick, Bernard
Author_Institution :
Computational Modeling Lab., Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium
Abstract :
This paper is a first step to extending Judea Pearl´s work on identification of causal effects to a multi-agent context. We introduce multi-agent causal models consisting of a collection of agents each having access to a non-disjoint subset of the variables constituting the domain. Every agent has a causal model, determined by nonexperimental data and an acyclic causal diagram over its variables. The algorithm under investigation in this paper, tests whether the assumptions made in a causal model are sufficient to calculate the effect of an intervention (i.e. whether the effect of an intervention is identifiable). It is a distributed algorithm with a minimum amount of inter-agent communication concerning solely shared variables and where the details of each local causal model are kept confidential.
Keywords :
distributed algorithms; message passing; multi-agent systems; agent collection; causal effect identifiability; distributed algorithm; inter-agent communication; multi-agent causal model; Books; Computational modeling; Distributed algorithms; Humans; Lighting control; Machinery; Organizing; Roads; Testing; Traffic control;
Conference_Titel :
Intelligent Agent Technology, 2003. IAT 2003. IEEE/WIC International Conference on
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-1931-8
DOI :
10.1109/IAT.2003.1241155