An Experiment in Causal Discovery Using a Pneumonia Database
Abstract
We tested a causal discovery algorithm on a database of pneumonia patients. The output of the causal discovery algorithm is a list of statements "A causes B", where A and B are variables in the database, and a score indicating the degree of confidence in the statement. We compared the output of the algorithm with the opinions of physicians about whether A caused B or not. We found that the doctors opinions were independent of the output of the algorithm. However, an examination of the output of results suggested a simple, well motivated modification of the algorithm which would bring the output of the algorithm into high agreement with the physicians opinions.
Cite
Text
Spirtes and Cooper. "An Experiment in Causal Discovery Using a Pneumonia Database." Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 1999.Markdown
[Spirtes and Cooper. "An Experiment in Causal Discovery Using a Pneumonia Database." Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 1999.](https://mlanthology.org/aistats/1999/spirtes1999aistats-experiment/)BibTeX
@inproceedings{spirtes1999aistats-experiment,
title = {{An Experiment in Causal Discovery Using a Pneumonia Database}},
author = {Spirtes, Peter and Cooper, Gregory F.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
year = {1999},
volume = {R2},
url = {https://mlanthology.org/aistats/1999/spirtes1999aistats-experiment/}
}