Decision-theoretic foundations for causal reasoning

We present a denition of cause and eect in terms of decision-theoretic primitives and thereby provide a principled foundation for causal reasoning. Our denition departs from the traditional view of causation in that causal assertions may vary with the set of decisions available. We argue that this approach provides added clarity to the notion of cause. Also in this paper, we examine the encoding of causal relationships in directed acyclic graphs. We describe a special class of in uence diagrams, those in canonical form, and show its relationship to Pearl's representation of cause and eect. Finally, we show how canonical form facilitates counterfactual reasoning. 1