The power of intervention

  • Authors:
  • Kevin B. Korb;Erik Nyberg

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Computer Science & Software Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, Australia;Department of History & Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Minds and Machines
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We further develop the mathematical theory of causal interventions, extending earlier results of Korb, Twardy, Handfield, & Oppy, (2005) and Spirtes, Glymour, Scheines (2000). Some of the skepticism surrounding causal discovery has concerned the fact that using only observational data can radically underdetermine the best explanatory causal model, with the true causal model appearing inferior to a simpler, faithful model (cf. Cartwright, (2001). Our results show that experimental data, together with some plausible assumptions, can reduce the space of viable explanatory causal models to one.