Many tasks in statistical and causal inference can be construed as problems of \emph{entailment} in a suitable formal language. We ask whether those problems are more difficult, from a computational perspective, for \emph{causal} probabilistic languages than for pure probabilistic (or "associational") languages. Despite several senses in which causal reasoning is indeed more complex -- both expressively and inferentially -- we show that causal entailment (or satisfiability) problems can be systematically and robustly reduced to purely probabilistic problems. Thus there is no jump in computational complexity. Along the way we answer several open problems concerning the complexity of well known probability logics, in particular demonstrating the $\exists\mathbb{R}$-completeness of a polynomial probability calculus, as well as a seemingly much simpler system, the logic of comparative conditional probability.
翻译:在统计和因果推论中,许多任务可以被解释为在一种适当的正式语言中出现 emph{causal} 问题。我们问,从计算的角度来说,这些问题是否比纯概率(或“关联性”)语言更难解决,而不是纯粹概率(或“关联性”)语言。尽管在几种意义上,因果关系推理确实更为复杂 -- -- 明示和推论都是如此 -- -- 我们表明,因果(或相对性)问题可以系统化和有力地减少到纯粹的概率问题。因此,计算复杂性没有跳跃。在方法上,我们回答几个关于众所周知概率逻辑复杂性的公开问题,特别是展示多数值概率计算法的美元和看起来简单得多的系统,即比较有条件概率的逻辑。