Abstract
Ascribing causality amounts to determining what elements in a sequence of reported facts can be related in a causal way, on the basis of some knowledge about the course of the world. The paper offers a comparison of a large span of formal models (based on structural equations, non-monotonic consequence relations, trajectory preference relations, identification of violated norms, graphical representations, or connectionism), using a running example taken from a corpus of car accident reports. Interestingly enough, the compared approaches focus on different aspects of the problem by either identifying all the potential causes, or selecting a smaller subset by taking advantages of contextually abnormal facts, or by modeling interventions to get rid of simple correlations. The paper concludes by a general discussion based on a battery of criteria (several of them being proper to AI approaches to causality).
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Benferhat, S. et al. (2008). A Comparative Study of Six Formal Models of Causal Ascription. In: Greco, S., Lukasiewicz, T. (eds) Scalable Uncertainty Management. SUM 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5291. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87993-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87993-0_6
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