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Scientific models describe natural phenomena at different levels of abstraction. Abstract descriptions can provide the basis for interventions on the system and explanation of observed phenomena at a level of granularity that is coarser than the most fundamental account of the system. Beckers and Halpern [2019], building on work of Rubenstein et al.[2017], developed an account of \emph{abstraction} for causal models that is exact. Here we extend this account to the more realistic case where an abstract causal model offers only an approximation of the underlying system. We show how the resulting account handles the discrepancy that can arise between low- and high-level causal models of the same system, and in the process provide an account of how one causal model approximates another, a topic of independent interest. Finally, we extend the account of approximate abstractions to probabilistic causal models, indicating how and where uncertainty can enter into an approximate abstraction.
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Abstracting causal models
We consider a sequence of successively more restrictive definitions of abstraction for causal models, starting with a notion introduced by Rubenstein et al. called exact transformation that applies to probabilistic causal models, moving to a notion of uniform transformation that applies to deterministic causal models and does not allow differences to be hidden by the ``right'' choice of distribution, and then to abstraction, where the interventions of interest are determined by the map from low-level states to high-level states, and strong abstraction, which takes more seriously all potential interventions in a model, not just the allowed interventions. We show that procedures for combining micro-variables into macro-variables are instances of our notion of strong abstraction, as are all the examples considered by Rubenstein et al.
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- PAR ID:
- 10093616
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Abstracting causal models, Proceedings of the Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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