DAG

Like many engineers, my first models were based on Designed Experiments in the tradition of Cox and Montgomery. I hadn’t seen anything like a causal diagram until I picked the The Book of Why which explores all sorts of experimental relationships and structures I never imagined.1 Colliders, confounders, causal diagrams, M-bias - these concepts are all relatively new to me and I want to understand them better. In this post I will attempt to create some simple structural causal models (SCMs) for myself using the Dagitty and GGDag packages and then show the potential effects of confounders and colliders on a simulated experiment adapted from here.