Cyclic Counterfactuals under Shift-Scale Interventions

Abstract: Most counterfactual inference frameworks traditionally assume acyclic structural causal models (SCMs), i.e. directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). However, many real-world systems (e.g. biological systems) contain feedback loops or cyclic dependencies that violate acyclicity. In this work, we study counterfactual inference in cyclic SCMs under shift-scale interventions, i.e., soft, policy-style changes that rescale and/or shift a variable's mechanism.