Front-door Reducibility: Reducing ADMGs to the Standard Front-door Setting via a Graphical Criterion
This work addresses the problem of interpretability and computational simplicity in causal identification for researchers in causal inference, offering a complementary method to existing algorithms.
The paper tackles the limited applicability of the front-door criterion in causal graphs by introducing front-door reducibility (FDR), a graphical condition that reduces complex acyclic directed mixed graphs (ADMGs) to a front-door setting, enabling simple, estimable adjustments where general identification expressions are cumbersome.
Front-door adjustment provides a simple closed-form identification formula under the classical front-door criterion, but its applicability is often viewed as narrow and strict. Although ID algorithm is very useful and is proved effective for causal relation identification in general causal graphs (if it is identifiable), performing ID algorithm does not guarantee to obtain a practical, easy-to-estimate interventional distribution expression. We argue that the applicability of the front-door criterion is not as limited as it seems: many more complicated causal graphs can be reduced to the front-door criterion. In this paper, We introduce front-door reducibility (FDR), a graphical condition on acyclic directed mixed graphs (ADMGs) that extends the applicability of the classic front-door criterion to reduce a large family of complicated causal graphs to a front-door setting by aggregating variables into super-nodes (FDR triple) $\left(\boldsymbol{X}^{*},\boldsymbol{Y}^{*},\boldsymbol{M}^{*}\right)$. After characterizing FDR criterion, we prove a graph-level equivalence between the satisfication of FDR criterion and the applicability of FDR adjustment. Meanwhile, we then present FDR-TID, an exact algorithm that detects an admissible FDR triple, together with established the algorithm's correctness, completeness, and finite termination. Empirically-motivated examples illustrate that many graphs outside the textbook front-door setting are FDR, yielding simple, estimable adjustments where general ID expressions would be cumbersome. FDR thus complements existing identification method by prioritizing interpretability and computational simplicity without sacrificing generality across mixed graphs.