The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (Penguin Science)

by Judea Pearl

Side by side with this diagrammatic “language of knowledge,” we also have a symbolic “language of queries” to express the questions we want answers to. For example, if we are interested in the effect of a drug (D) on lifespan (L), then our query might be written symbolically as: P(L | do(D)). In other words, what is the probability (P) that a typical patient would survive L years if made to take the drug? This question describes what epidemiologists would call an intervention or a treatment and corresponds to what we measure in a clinical trial. In many cases we may also wish to compare P(L | do(D)) with P(L | do(not-D)); the latter describes patients denied treatment, also called the “control” patients. The do-operator signifies that we are dealing with an intervention rather than a passive observation;