Those methods were invented by Judea Pearl, a computer science professor at UCLA who won the Turing Award in 2011 partly for that work. He's written several books on the topic. The most recent is The Book of Why. See here for previous discussions of the book including one just two days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24487135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20889143 ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18871450