Causal Analysis in Theory and Practice

July 11, 2012

Summer-Greetings from the Causality Blog

Filed under: Announcement,General — eb @ 4:00 pm

Dear friends in causality research,

This communication highlights a few meetings in the summer of 2012, that should be of interest to causality researchers. Naturally, these are biased in favor of those that were brought to my attention. If you know of more such meetings, feel free to post.

1.
July 22-26, 2012, Toronto, Canada
Annual Conference of the Association for Advancement of
Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-12,
http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/2012/

I will present a lecture on “The Mechanization of Causal Inference, a Mini Turing-Test and Beyond”`
http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/2012/aaai12turing.php
and Elias Bareinboim will present a completeness result for the transportability problem.
http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r390.pdf

2.
Joint Statistical Meeting
JSM 2012, San Diego, CA, July 28-Aug 3, 2012
There are 73 papers and meetings on causal inference listed in the program, here they are: http://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2012/onlineprogram/KeywordSearchResults.cfm

These include a day-long course on Targeted Learning: Causal Inference for Observational and Experimental Data
CE_08C Sun, 7/29/2012, 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM HQ-Indigo E
by Maya Petersen, Sherri Rose, Mark van der Laan, http://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2012/onlineprogram/AbstractDetails.cfm?abstractid=304318

And J. Pearl tutorial “Causal Inference in Statistics: A gentle introduction” Sunday, July 17 4-6pm http://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2012/onlineprogram/AbstractDetails.cfm?abstractid=304318

—————An Interesting Observation ——
In 2002, JSM-2002 had only 13 papers on causal inference, By any gauge, 73 is a positive sign of progress in the field.
—————end of interesting observation ——

3.
UAI2012, Catalina, CA, August 15-17, 2012
(Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence)

Workshop on Causal Structure Learning, Aug. 18
http://www.stat.washington.edu/tsr/uai-causal-structure-learning-workshop/

Alison Gopnik will speak on “Babies, Brain and Bayes (Banquet Speech), Thursday, Aug. 16.,
and I will speak on “Do-Calculus Revisited” Aug. 17, 1:30 pm
http://www.auai.org/uai2012/invited.shtml

4.
Workshop on Networks Processes and Causality
Sept 3-6, 2012, Menorca, Spain
http://people.tuebingen.mpg.de/networks-workshop/

5.
MLSP 2012 Special Session on Causal Discovery
IEEE Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP 2012)

September 23-26 2012, Santander, Spain
http://mlsp2012.conwiz.dk/index.php?id=3D62

6.
Symposium on Causal Inference, University of Michigan,
December 12, 2012. Contact: Professor Yu Xie.

Miscellaneous
7.
Larry Wasserman has a new blog, and dedicated a page to befriending “causality”.
http://normaldeviate.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/48/

8.
A new book “Causality: Statistical Perspectives and Applications”,
C. Berzuini, P. Dawid and L. Bernardinelli (Eds.)

has just been published by Wiley (Chihester) July 2012: see
http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470665564.html .

Perpetual online access to the book is available on:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781119945710.fmatter/summary

9.
Another new book appeared this month
R.H. Hoyle (Ed.) Handbook of Structural Equation Modeling, New York: Guilford Press.
It contains my chapter on “The Causal Foundations of SEM”
ttp://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r370.pdf

10.
Finally, the UCLA fruit basket offers a few fresh items, see http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/csl_papers.html
One item of interest to economists-educators is:
Chen and Pearl “A Critical Examination of Econometrics Textbooks,” where we survey six influential econometric textbooks in terms of their mathematical treatment of causal concepts. The conclusions are revealing, if you click on http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r395.pdf (And if you have ideas on reforming econometric education, please share.)

Wishing you an insightful and productive summer
Best,
Judea Pearl

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