Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference
Judea Pearl | 2000-03-13 00:00:00 | Cambridge University Press | 384 | Artificial Intelligence
Written by one of the pre-eminent researchers in the field, this book provides a comprehensive exposition of modern analysis of causation. It shows how causality has grown from a nebulous concept into a mathematical theory with significant applications in the fields of statistics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, cognitive science, and the health and social sciences. Pearl presents a unified account of the probabilistic, manipulative, counterfactual and structural approaches to causation, and devises simple mathematical tools for analyzing the relationships between causal connections, statistical associations, actions and observations. The book will open the way for including causal analysis in the standard curriculum of statistics, artifical intelligence, business, epidemiology, social science and economics. Students in these areas will find natural models, simple identification procedures, and precise mathematical definitions of causal concepts that traditional texts have tended to evade or make unduly complicated. This book will be of interest to professionals and students in a wide variety of fields. Anyone who wishes to elucidate meaningful relationships from data, predict effects of actions and policies, assess explanations of reported events, or form theories of causal understanding and causal speech will find this book stimulating and invaluable.
Reviews
Judea Pearl is one of the leading researchers in the topic of casuality. What is causality? In the exploration of statistical data we are often able to find relationships or correlations between two variables. We are often tempted to attribute the results of one variable, say A as an outcome (being high or low)that is due to the result (high or low) of the other, say B. We want to say that B is the cause of the outcome of A. Significant correlation by itself only suggests relationships. It cannot tell you whether A causes B or B causes A or neither. Causility is the study of designing experiments to allow you to determine if a relationship has a cause and effect. The subject matter is very philosophical and somewhat controversial. But a lot of research effort has gone into providing mathematical rigor to the concept. Pearl is one of those rare scientists who can contribute to such theory and explain it. But as Aickin suggests in his amazon review this is not a subject for a novice. Previous exposure to statistical methods such as correlation and regression is important to a clear unbderstanding of this book.
Reviews
This is a very interesing book that Judea Pearl worte. The topic is currently of general interest for diverse fields as economics, social sciences and biology, however, this book is not intended for practitoners from these field who face a special problem and search for a possible solution. If you want to buy this book for this reason you will not be able to extract this information for this book. The reason therefor is that important technics like Bayesian Networks or Structural Equations are treated in 3 pages in each case. Judea Pearl assumes that the reader is already familiar with such methods beforehand. (Readers interested in the later subject are strongly refered to Bollen's book "Structural Equations with latent variables".)
Moreover, I do not think that this book presents state of the art information about our current knowledge of this subject. For example, the important problem to extract a network structure (structure learning) from data rather than estimating the parameters of a given networks structure is completely missing.
Nevertheless, this is a good book, because it might give you in the long run (you can not read it in one piece) insights you did not have before. Of course not to all topics causality is involved (see, e.g., above) but the given topics are thorough explained albeit on an advanced level.
Update: I add one star (total three) to my evaluation, because in the meanwhile I appreciate the historical development described in the book including references to the literature.
Reviews
Pearl included an Epilogue containing a lecture he gave in 1996 entitled, "The Art and Science of Cause and Effect."
Pearl concludes the lecture by comparing his theory of causality to the first mathematical tool,the abacus: "But the really challenging problems are still ahead: We still do not have a causal understanding of poverty and cancer and intolerance, and only the accumulation of data and the insight of great minds will eventually lead to such understanding. "The data is all over the place, the insight is yours, and now an abacus is at your disposal, too. I hope the combination amplifies each of these components."
Unfortunately, virtually no advances have been made in learning the causation of intolerance nor how to rid us of it. And Judea Pearl suffered immensely because of that . . . Daniel Pearl, his son, was killed in Iraq due to intolerance. :-(
BTW, the book is great.
Reviews
The scientific research community has adopted rigorous methods to eliminate the need for subjective judgments about many things, but when it comes to testing whether X causes Y, they revert to intuition and hand-waving. This book makes a strong argument that we shouldn't accept that. It demonstrates that it is possible to turn intuitions about causation into hypotheses that are unambiguous and testable.
But the style is sufficiently dense and dry we will need some additional books with more practical styles before these ideas become widely understood. The style is fairly good by the standards of books whose main goal is rigorous proof, but it's still hard work to learn a large number of new concepts that are mostly referred to by terse symbols whose meaning can't be found via a glossary or index. Pearl occasionally introduces a memorable word, such as do(x), the way a software engineer who wants readable code would, but mostly sticks to single-character symbols that seem unreasonably hard (at least for us programmers who are used to descriptive names) to remember.
If you're uncertain whether reading this book is worth the effort, I strongly recommend reading the afterword first. It ought to have been used as the introduction, and without it many readers will be left wondering why they should believe they will be rewarded for slogging through so much dry material.
Reviews
This is a pioneering book dealing exhaustively with the subject of causation. Its contribution to the field of "Uncertainty in AI" is unmeasureable. It dealt with graphical models for reasoning in depth. For computer scientists looking for an encyclopedia of algorithms and applications on causation, there can not be a better book. I highly recommend this book for researchers in UAI. A word of caution: This is not a book for starters and those who do not have a well developed concept of uncertainty.
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