Indipendence of Cause and Mechanism

The cause and mechanisms shall be separated. One direction is the cause, the other is the mechanism that actuates the effect of the cause. Take for example the altitude and temperature example in (Peters et al. 2017) chapter 2.

The distribution of the cause p(a)p(a)p(a) and the mechanism p(t∣a)p(t|a)p(t∣a) that maps it to the effect are independent.

Structural Causal Models

We say that given two statistical processes $C, E$, where $C$ is the cause and E the effect, then the

References

[1] Peters et al. “Elements of Causal Inference: Foundations and Learning Algorithms” The MIT Press 2017