The Mathematics of Cause and Effect - DLS Talk by Judea Pearl, UCLA (ESB, Room 1013)

**New Location**:  Earth Sciences Building (2207 Main Mall), Room 1013

Speaker:  Judea Pearl, Professor (UCLA) and ACM Turing Award Winner

Title: The Mathematics of Cause and Effect

Abstract:

Recent developments in graphical models and the logicof causation have had a drastic effect on the way scientists now treat problems involving cause-effect relationships.  Paradoxes and controversies have been resolved, slippery concepts have been demystified, and practical problems requiring causal information, which long were regarded as either metaphysical or unmanageable can now be solved using elementary mathematics.

I will review concepts, principles, and mathematical tools that were found useful in this transformation, and will demonstrate their applications in several data-intensive sciences. These include questions of causal effect estimation, confounding control, policy analysis, misspecification
tests and the integration of data from diverse studies.

Of special emphasis would be the following topics:

1. The Mediation Formula, and what it tells us about direct and indirect effects.
2. What mathematics can tell us about "external validity" or "generalizing from experiments"
3. What graph theory can tell us about recovering from sample-selection bias.

Reference: J. Pearl, Causality (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Tutorials:
http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/IJCAI99/

Background material for circulation:
http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r355-reprint.pdf
http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r379.pdf
http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r381.pdf

Working papers:
http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/csl_papers.html

Bio:

Judea Pearl is a professor of computer science and statistics at UCLA.  He is a graduate of the Technion, Israel, and has joined the faculty of UCLA in 1970, where he currently directs the Cognitive Systems Laboratory and conducts research in artificial intelligence, causal inference and philosophy of science.

Pearl has authored several hundreds research papers and three books: Heuristics (1984), Probabilistic Reasoning (1988), and Causality (2000;2009). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the IEEE, AAAI and the Cognitive Science Society. Pearl received the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Science and the 2011 David Rumelhart Prize from the Cognitive Science Society. In 2012, he received the Technion's Harvey Prize and the ACM A.M. Turing Award.

Home page: http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/jp_home.html
Extended bio: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/pearl_2658896.cfm