Rethinking the framework constructed by counterfactual functional model

摘要

The causal inference represented by counterfactual inference technology breathes new life into the current field of artificial intelligence. Although the fusion of causal inference and artificial intelligence has an excellent performance in many various applications, some theoretical justifications have not been well resolved. In this paper, we focus on two fundamental issues in causal inference: probabilistic evaluation of counterfactual queries and the assumptions used to evaluate causal effects. Both of these issues are closely related to counterfactual inference tasks. Among them, counterfactual queries focus on the outcome of the inference task, and the assumptions provide the preconditions for performing the inference task. Counterfactual queries are to consider the question of what kind of causality would arise if we artificially apply the conditions contrary to the facts. In general, to obtain a unique solution, the evaluation of counterfactual queries requires the assistance of a functional model. We analyze the limitations of the original functional model when evaluating a specific query and find that the model arrives at ambiguous conclusions when the unique probability solution is 0. In the task of estimating causal effects, the experiments are conducted under some strong assumptions, such as treatment-unit additivity. However, such assumptions are often insatiable in real-world tasks, and there is also a lack of scientific representation of the assumptions themselves. We propose a mild version of the treatment-unit additivity assumption coined as M-TUA based on the damped vibration equation in physics to alleviate this problem. M-TUA reduces the strength of the constraints in the original assumptions with reasonable formal expression.