Causal inference in statistics: An overview

Statistics SurveysVol. 3 (2009) 96 146 ISSN: 1935-7516 inference in statistics: An overview Judea PearlComputer Science DepartmentUniversity of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095 review presents empirical researcherswith recent advancesin Causal inference , and stresses the paradigmatic shifts that must be un-dertaken in moving from traditional statistical analysis to Causal analysis ofmultivariate data. Special emphasis is placed on the assumptions that un-derly all Causal inferences, the languages used in formulating those assump-tions, the conditional nature of all Causal and counterfactual claims, andthe methods that have been developed for the assessment of such advances are illustrated using a general theory of causation basedon the Structural Causal Model (SCM) described inPearl(2000a), whichsubsumes and unifies other approaches to causation, and provides a coher-ent mathematical foundation for the analysis of causes and particular, the paper surveys the development of mathematical tools forinferring (from a combination of data and assumptions) answers to threetypes of Causal queries.

The methodology of “causal discovery” (Spirtes et al. 2000; Pearl 2000a, Chapter 2) is likewise basedon thecausalassumptionof “faithfulness”or “stability,”a problem-independent assumption that concerns relationships between the structure of a model and the data it generates.

Tags:

  Inference, Pearl, Casual, Causal inference

Information

Related search queries