(Simpson 1951; Blyth 1972), first encountered by Pearson in 1899 (Aldrich 1995), refers to the phenomenon whereby an event C increases the probabilit… - Judea Pearl

The research questions that motivate most quantitative studies in the health, social and behavioral sciences are not statistical but causal in nature. For example, what is the efficacy of a given drug in a given population? Whether data can prove an employer guilty of hiring discrimination? What fraction of past crimes could have been avoided by a given policy? What was the cause of death of a given individual, in a specific incident? These are causal questions because they require some knowledge of the data-generating process; they cannot be computed from the data alone.

Traditional statistics is strong in devising ways of describing data and inferring distributional parameters from sample. Causal inference requires two additional ingredients: a science-friendly language for articulating causal knowledge, and a mathematical machinery for processing that knowledge, combining it with data and drawing new causal conclusions about a phenomenon.

A quantity Q(M) is identifiable, given a set of assumptions A, iffor any two models M1 and M2 that satisfy A, we have