You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

paper-machine comments on [LINK] If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does? - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Strilanc 12 July 2013 05:39AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (23)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 July 2013 03:14:07PM *  0 points [-]

Do you know if there's an efficient algorithm for determining when two subsets of a DAG are d-separated given another? The naive algorithm seems to be a bit slow.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 12 July 2013 04:22:18PM *  4 points [-]

http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~zoubin/course05/BayesBall.pdf

Amusing name, linear time algorithm. Also amusingly I happen to have direct line of sight on the author while writing this post :).

In some sense, we know a priori that d-separation has to be linear time because it is a slightly fancy graph traversal. If you don't like Bayes Ball, you can use the moralization algorithm due to Lauritzen (described here:

http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~steffen/teaching/grad/graphicalmodels.pdf

see slide titled "alternative equivalent separation"), which is slightly harder to follow for an unaided human, but which has a very simple implementation (which reduces to a simple DFS traversal of an undirected graph you construct).

edit: fixed links, hopefully.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 July 2013 03:58:54AM 1 point [-]

Yeah, sadly both links are broken for me.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 13 July 2013 12:11:20AM 1 point [-]

Link is broken for me.