Causation, Prediction, and Search, Second Edition (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning)

What assumptions and methods allow us to turn observations into causal knowledge, and how can even incomplete causal knowledge be used in planning and prediction to influence and control our environment? In this book Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour, and Richard Scheines address these questions using the formalism of Bayes networks, with results that have been applied in diverse areas of research in the social, behavioral, and physical sciences.

The authors show that although experimental and observational study designs may not always permit the same inferences, they are subject to uniform principles. They axiomatize the connection between causal structure and probabilistic independence, explore several varieties of causal indistinguishability, formulate a theory of manipulation, and develop asymptotically reliable procedures for searching over equivalence classes of causal models, including models of categorical data and structural equation models with and without latent variables.

The authors show that the relationship between causality and probability can also help to clarify such diverse topics in statistics as the comparative power of experimentation versus observation, Simpson's paradox, errors in regression models, retrospective versus prospective sampling, and variable selection.

The second edition contains a new introduction and an extensive survey of advances and applications that have appeared since the first edition was published in 1993.

Peter Spirtes is Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, Carnegie Mellon University. Clark Glymour is Alumni University Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University and Valtz Family Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He is also Distinguished External Member of the Center for Human and Machine Cognition at the University of West Florida, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Richard Scheines is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, and at the Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.