Info Intervention

Abstract

Causal diagrams based on do intervention are useful tools to formalize, process and understand causal relationship among variables. However, the do intervention has controversial interpretation of causal questions for non-manipulable variables, and it also lacks the power to check the conditions related to counterfactual variables. This paper introduces a new info intervention to tackle these two problems, and provides causal diagrams for communication and theoretical focus based on this info intervention. Our info intervention intervenes the input/output information of causal mechanisms, while the do intervention intervenes the causal mechanisms. Consequently, the causality is viewed as information transfer in the info intervention framework. As an extension, the generalized info intervention is also proposed and studied in this paper.