Title: Causal reasoning and modularity: a new perspective

Speaker: Prof. Jiji Zhang (HKBU, https://rel.hkbu.edu.hk/people/zhang-jiji)

Time:  15:10~18:00 (Dec. 14th)

Zoom Meeting Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82538763664?pwd="bjJxUVlWck8vdHJiUm5tV050UktrUT09

Meeting ID:  825 3876 3664 Password:  713431

Abstract: Modularity plays a foundational role in much of the graphical causal modelling that has been gaining ground in AI research. The idea that a causal system can be decomposed into a set of local modules underlies, on the one hand, the basic principles for reasoning about interventions such as the celebrated do-calculus, and on the other hand, some novel techniques for learning causal structures from data. In this talk, we propose a new account of modularity that is at once more abstract and more intuitive, using the graphical language of string diagrams in category theory. We present a characterization of this formal notion of modularity in terms of graphical features of the causal structure, which unifies the standard rules of reasoning about interventions, and is potentially useful for extending modularity-based causal discovery algorithms.