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Cost and Actual Causation (1707.09704v1)
Published 31 Jul 2017 in cs.AI
Abstract: I propose the purpose our concept of actual causation serves is minimizing various cost in intervention practice. Actual causation has three features: nonredundant sufficiency, continuity and abnormality; these features correspond to the minimization of exploitative cost, exploratory cost and risk cost in intervention practice. Incorporating these three features, a definition of actual causation is given. I test the definition in 66 causal cases from actual causation literature and show that this definition's application fit intuition better than some other causal modelling based definitions.