On the Incompleteness of do-calculus for Universal Identifiability

arXiv:2611.08916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of causal effect identification from an arbitrary set of observational and/or interventional distributions, which we call Universal Identifiability (uID). The uID problem generalizes existing classical identifiability (ID) and general identifiability (gID) problems, which considered the identification problem from either mere observational distributions or a specific type of interventional distributions. Prior research has established graphical criteria to determine when a causal effect is identifiable in ID and gID problems. Moreover, algorithms that leverage do-calculus and basic probability manipulations have been proposed to compute these effects. Consequently, it has been shown that do-calculus is both sound and complete in these problems. Despite these well-established results, a formal definition of what it means for the do-calculus to be complete does not exist. We propose a rigorous formalization for the completeness of the do-calculus and show that the completeness results in previous work remain valid. However, for more general problems, such as uID, the rules of do-calculus are no longer complete. This is perhaps the reason why the uID problem has remained open thus far.