This paper demonstrates the use of graphs as a mathematical tool for expressing independenices, and as a formal language for communicating and processing causal information in statistical analysis. We show how complex information about external interventions can be organized and represented graphically and, conversely, how the graphical representation can be used to facilitate quantitative predictions of the effects of interventions. We first review the Markovian account of causation and show that directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) offer an economical scheme for representing conditional independence assumptions and for deducing and displaying all the logical consequences of such assumptions. We then introduce the manipulative account of causation and show that any DAG defines a simple transformation which tells us how the probability distribution will change as a result of external interventions in the system. Using this transformation it is possible to quantify, from non-experimental data...