Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Bayesian Structural Causal Inference With Probabilistic Programming, Sam A. Witty

Doctoral Dissertations

Reasoning about causal relationships is central to the human experience. This evokes a natural question in our pursuit of human-like artificial intelligence: how might we imbue intelligent systems with similar causal reasoning capabilities? Better yet, how might we imbue intelligent systems with the ability to learn cause and effect relationships from observation and experimentation? Unfortunately, reasoning about cause and effect requires more than just data: it also requires partial knowledge about data generating mechanisms. Given this need, our task then as computational scientists is to design data structures for representing partial causal knowledge, and algorithms for updating that knowledge in …