<p>I'm currently reading "Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference" by Judea Pearl. Early on, he states that the development assumes that there are no certain entailments, no 1 or 0 probabilities -- that every assignment to variables in a causal model has nonzero probability.</p>

<p>I'm interested in applying some of these ideas to program analysis, where perfect entailment is the norm, and most combinations of assignments are impossible. How much of the theory of causality still applies in this scenario?</p>

<p>One interesting note is that he actually violates his own rule at one point when he talks about modelling a STRIPS-like planning language, and mentions in passing assigning 1 or 0 probabilities in that case.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-03-21T18:10:28.180Z
I feel this might be more suitable for [stats.se] since it seems to be more about practice than theory.
Kaveh
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-03-22T03:41:39.900Z
I do see this as a theoretical concern, but there does seem to be a lot more discussion of causality and Pearl's work there.
James Koppel
<pr.probability><st.statistics><program-analysis>
Establishing causality under conditions of certainty
James Koppel
# Establishing causality under conditions of certainty

(Asked by: username_0 on 2015-03-20)

I'm currently reading "Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference" by Judea Pearl. Early on, he states that the development assumes that there are no certain entailments, no 1 or 0 probabilities -- that every assignment to variables in a causal model has nonzero probability.

I'm interested in applying some of these ideas to program analysis, where perfect entailment is the norm, and most combinations of assignments are impossible. How much of the theory of causality still applies in this scenario?

One interesting note is that he actually violates his own rule at one point when he talks about modelling a STRIPS-like planning language, and mentions in passing assigning 1 or 0 probabilities in that case.

**Tags:** pr.probability, st.statistics, program-analysis

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: I feel this might be more suitable for [stats.se] since it seems to be more about practice than theory.  
> **username_0**: I do see this as a theoretical concern, but there does seem to be a lot more discussion of causality and Pearl's work there.  

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## 0 answers

