Talk by Tineke Blom

You are all cordially invited to the AMLab seminar on Tuesday April 17 at 16:00 in C3.163, where Tineke Blom will give a talk titled “Causal Modeling for Dynamical Systems using Generalized Structural Causal Models”. Afterwards there are the usual drinks and snacks!

Abstract: Structural causal models (SCMs) are a popular tool to describe causal relations in systems in many fields such as economy, the social sciences, and biology. Complex (cyclical) dynamical systems, such as chemical reaction networks, are often described by a set of ODEs. We show that SCMs are not flexible enough in general to give a complete causal representation of equilibrium states in these dynamical systems. Since such systems do form an important modeling class for real-world data, we extend the concept of an SCM to a generalized structural causal model. We show that this allows us to capture the essential causal semantics that characterize dynamical systems. We illustrate our approach on a basic enzymatic reaction.