A Crash Course in Good and Bad Control

Carlos Cinelli, Andrew Forney and Judea Pearl Introduction If you were trained in traditional regression pedagogy, chances are that you have heard about the problem of “bad controls”. The problem arises when we need to decide whether the addition...

What Statisticians Want to Know about Causal Inference and The Book of Why

I was privileged to be interviewed recently by David Hand, Professor of Statistics at Imperial College, London, and a former President of the Royal Statistical Society. I would like to share this interview with readers of this blog since many of the questions...

Race, COVID Mortality, and Simpson’s Paradox (by Dana Mackenzie)

Summary This post reports on the presence of Simpson’s paradox in the latest CDC data on coronavirus. At first glance, the data may seem to support the notion that coronavirus is especially dangerous to white, non-Hispanic people. However, when we take...

Data versus Science: Contesting the Soul of Data-Science

SummaryThe post below is written for the upcoming Spanish translation of The Book of Why, which was announced today. It expresses my firm belief that the current data-fitting direction taken by “Data Science” is temporary (read my lips!), that the...

Radical Empiricism and Machine Learning Research

A speaker at a lecture that I have attended recently summarized the philosophy of machine learning this way: “All knowledge comes from observed data, some from direct sensory experience and some from indirect experience, transmitted to us either culturally...

Causally Colored Reflections on Leo Breiman’s “Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures” (2001) https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.ss/1009213726

Enticed by a recent seminar on this subject, I have re-read Breiman’s influential paper and would like to share with readers a re-assessment of its contributions to the art of statistical modeling. When the paper first appeared, in 2001, I had the impression...

The Domestication of Causal Reasoning

1. Introduction On Wednesday December 23 I had the honor of participating in “AI Debate 2”, a symposium organized by Montreal AI, which brought together an impressive group of scholars to discuss the future of AI. I spoke on “The Domestication...