Message from Judea Pearl
Dear colleague in causality research,
This is a belated End-of-Summer greeting from the UCLA Causality blog, welcoming you back to an open discussion of causality-related issues. Below please find four new postings and three hot topics for discussion.
1. New postings:
Three new papers and several lecture videos have been posted on our website.
1.1. Pearl and Bareinboim, “Transportability across studies: A formal approach,” October 2010.
http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r372.pdf
The paper introduces a formal representation for encoding differences between populations and derives procedures for deciding whether (and how) causal effects in the target environment can be inferred from experimental findings in another.
1.2. J. Pearl, “The Causal Foundations of Structural Equation Modeling,” August 2010.
http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r370.pdf
The paper summarizes how traditional SEM methods can be enriched by modern advances in causal and counterfactual inference.
As always, we welcome your views on this topic. To continue the discussion, please use the comment link below to add your thoughts. You can also suggest a new topic of discussion using our submission form by clicking here.
I’m very interested to see the paper on “transportability”, or extrapolation. I’ll read that one as soon as I can. In the meantime I’d just like to point out that I published a book on that topic (Across the Boundaries: Extrapolation in Biology in Social Science, 2008 Oxford). The book examines the commonly made suggestion that knowledge about mechanisms can assist extrapolation, tries to clarify the assumptions that underlie that idea by means of concepts from the literature on causation and Bayes nets, and explores some implications of this analysis for philosophy of science topics (like ceteris paribus laws).
Comment by Daniel Steel — October 8, 2010 @ 11:17 am