Causality and Intervention in Business Process Management

The paper presents an algebraic approach to the modeling of causality in systems of stochastic variables. The methodology is based on an operator of a composition that provides the possibility of composing a multidimensional distribution from low-dimensional building blocks taking advantage of the dependence structure of the problem variables. The authors formally define and demonstrate on a hypothetical example a surprisingly elegant unifying approach to conditioning by a single variable and the evaluation of the effect of an intervention. Both operations are realized by the composition with a degenerated distribution and differ only in the sequence in which the operator of the composition is performed