are_sufficient: Check if a certain set of component causes is suffcient

In epicmodel: Causal Modeling in Epidemiology

Check if a certain set of component causes is suffcient

Description

Provide a SCC model and a set of component causes and evaluate if the provided set of causes fulfills any sufficient cause, i.e., is sufficient for the outcome to occur based on the provided SCC model. Fulfilling a sufficient cause means that all component causes of a certain sufficient cause are in the provided set of causes. Unknown causes are ignored by this function.

Usage

are_sufficient(scc, causes = NULL, type = c("status", "binary"))

Arguments

scc	An object of class epicmodel_scc.
causes	NULL (default) or a character vector containing IDs of a set of component causes. If NULL, prints a list of all available component causes.
type	Either "status" (default) or "binary". If "status", returns one of "always", "depends", "never". If "binary", returns TRUE or FALSE.

Details

Depending on the value of type, the following values are possible:

• type = "status": If the provided set of causes contains all component causes of a sufficient cause with status "always", returns "always". If the provided set of causes only fulfills sufficient cause with status "depends" or "depends (potential order implausibilities)", returns "depends". If no sufficient causes are fulfilled, returns "never".

• type = "binary": If the returned status would have been "always" or "depends", TRUE is returned. If the returned status would have been "never", returns FALSE.

Value

For ⁠type = "binary⁠, returns TRUE if all component causes for at least one sufficient cause are in causes and FALSE otherwise. For type = status, returns "always" if at least one sufficient cause with sufficiency status "always" is fulfilled. If not, returns "depends" if at least one sufficient cause with sufficiency status "depends" or "depends (potential order implausibilities)" is fulfilled. If no sufficient cause is fulfilled, returns "never".

Examples

# Create some SCC model
steplist_checked <- check_steplist(steplist_rain)
scc_model <- create_scc(steplist_checked)

# Check sufficiency for a certain set of component causes
are_sufficient(scc_model, c("THENa1","THENa5"), type = "status")
are_sufficient(scc_model, c("THENa1","THENa5"), type = "binary")

epicmodel documentation built on April 12, 2025, 1:59 a.m.