pengvado comments on Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn't - Less Wrong

27 Post author: lukeprog 29 November 2012 09:00PM

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Comment author: IlyaShpitser 30 November 2012 10:07:28PM 8 points [-]

(a) You don't need to observe confounders to learn structure from data. In fact, sometimes you don't need any standard conditional independence at all. (Luke gave me the impression SI wasn't very interested in that point -- maybe it should be).

(b) Occam's razor / faithfulness gives you enough to learn the structure of statistical models, not causal ones. You need additional assumptions to equate the statistical models you learn with causal models. Bayesian networks are not causal models. Causality is not about conditional independence, it is about counterfactual invariance, that is causality expresses what changes or stays the same after a hypothetical 'wiggle.'

There is no guarantee that even given Occam's razor and faithfulness being true that the graph you obtain is such that if I wiggle a parent, the child will change. To verify your causal assumptions, you have to run an experiment, or no scientist will believe your graph is causal. This is what real causal discovery papers do, for example:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/308/5721/523.abstract

Here they learned a protein signaling network, but then implemented an experiment where they changed the protein level of a parent via an RNA molecule, and verified that the child changed, but parent of a parent did not change.


I am sure you can set up a Bayesian story for this entire enterprise, if you wanted. But, firstly, this Bayesian story would not be expressed purely in probability theory but in the language that can express counterfactual invariance and talk about experiments (for example language of potential outcomes or do(.)). And secondly, giving something a Bayesian story is sort of equivalent to re-expressing some complicated program as a vi macro. Could be done (vi is turing-complete!) but why? People don't write practical code in vi macros.

Comment author: pengvado 30 November 2012 11:55:38PM *  3 points [-]

On your account, how do you learn causal models from observing someone else perform an experiment? That doesn't involve any interventions or counterfactuals. You only see what actually happens, in a system that includes a scientist.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 01 December 2012 12:11:33AM *  4 points [-]

That depends what you mean by an "experiment." If you divide a set of patients into a control group and a test group, and then have the test group smoke a pack of cigarettes per day, that is an "experiment" to me, one that is represented by an intervention (because we are forcing the test group to smoke regardless of what they would naturally want to do).

Observing that the test group is much more likely to develop cancer would lead me to conclude that the graph

smoking -> cancer

is a causal graph rather than merely a statistical graph.


If we do not perform the above experiment due to ethical reasons, but instead use observational data on smokers, we have to worry about confounders, like Fisher did. We also have to worry, because we are implicitly linking that data with counterfactual situations (what would have happened if those guys we observed were forced to smoke). This linking isn't "free," there are assumptions operating in the background. Assumptions expressed in a language that can talk about counterfactual situations.