Theory-Based Causal Inference

Abstract

People routinely make sophisticated causal inferences unconsciously, ef- fortlessly, and from very little data – often from just one or a few ob- servations. We argue that these inferences can be explained as Bayesian computations over a hypothesis space of causal graphical models, shaped by strong top-down prior knowledge in the form of intuitive theories. We present two case studies of our approach, including quantitative mod- els of human causal judgments and brief comparisons with traditional bottom-up models of inference.

Cite

Text

Tenenbaum and Griffiths. "Theory-Based Causal Inference." Neural Information Processing Systems, 2002.

Markdown

[Tenenbaum and Griffiths. "Theory-Based Causal Inference." Neural Information Processing Systems, 2002.](https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2002/tenenbaum2002neurips-theorybased/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{tenenbaum2002neurips-theorybased,
  title     = {{Theory-Based Causal Inference}},
  author    = {Tenenbaum, Joshua B. and Griffiths, Thomas L.},
  booktitle = {Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year      = {2002},
  pages     = {43-50},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2002/tenenbaum2002neurips-theorybased/}
}