Picturing causality – the serendipitous semiotics of causal graphs

  • Authors:
  • Eric Neufeld;Sonje Kristtorn

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Sk, Canada;Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Sk, Canada

  • Venue:
  • SG'05 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Smart Graphics
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Bayesian nets (BNs) appeared in the 1980s as a solution to computational and representational problems encountered in knowledge representation of uncertain information. Shortly afterwards, BNs became an important part of the AI mainstream. During the 1990s, a lively discussion emerged regarding the causal semantics of Bayesian nets, challenging almost a century of statistical orthodoxy regarding inference of causal relations from observational data, and many refer to BNs now as causal graphs. However, the discussion of causal graphs as a data visualization tool has been limited. We argue here that causal graphs together with their causal semantics for seeing and setting, have the potential to be as powerful and generic a data visualization tool as line graphs or pie charts.