- Attributable proportion
a proportion of cases that would not have occurred had the population not been exposed, relative to observed cases in the total population exposed (i.e. counterfactual risk when exposed is compared with observed risk)
- Back door criterion
identifies variables blocking all biasing paths that would result in association between
and 
; a set of variables 
relative to variables and such that no variable from is a descendent of and blocks all backdoors paths from to - Causal diagram
a directed acyclic graph in which dependencies among connected nodes are linked to the observational data by the Markov assumption, so that the network of dependencies defines the set of the conditional probabilities of variables on their parents; the product of these conditional probabilities is said to be the factorization of the joint probability function of the variables
- Causal inference
the thought process to conclude whether a relation of cause to effect exists.
- Causality
the property of being related in causal fashion
- Causation
the production of an effect by its cause
- Conditional independence
equivalence of the joint distribution of two variables to the product of distributions of each variable, given value of a third variable