Archive of posts with category 'causality'

The Problem of Fairness.

In January, I took up a Sponsored Associate (read: internship) position at a research lab under the supervision of Prof Ferdinando Fioretto. The task is to look into causal notions...

Differential Equations vs. Structural Causal Models.

The explicit study of causality in AI fields has officially hit the ‘hype cycle’, at least according to Gartner [1]. There are usually important reasons these fields of study gain...

CRL Task 6: Causal Imitation Learning

And as quickly as that, we’re at task 6 of our quest. Causal imitation learning is perhaps the most fanciful-sounding, but at it’s core it remains as simple a goal...

CRL Task 5: Learning Causal Models

We’ve now come to one of the most vital aspects of this theory - how can we learn causal models? Learning models is often an exceptionally computationally intensive process, so...

CRL Task 4: Generalisability and Robustness

At this point we’ve developed a good sense of the technical theory of causal reinforcement learning. This next section brings together many important ideas and generalises notions of data transfer...

CRL Task 3: Counterfactual Decision Making

In the previous blog post we discussed some theory of how to select optimal and possibly optimal interventions in a causal framework. For those interested in the decision science, this...

CRL Task 2: Interventions - When and Where?

In the previous blog post we discussed the gorey details of generalised policy learning - the first task of CRL. We went into some very detailed mathematical description of dynamic...

CRL Task 1: Generalised Policy Learning

In the previous blog post we developed some ideas and theory needed to discuss a causal approach to reinforcement learning. We formalised notions of multi-armed bandits (MABs), Markov Decision Processes...

Preliminaries for CRL

In the previous blog post we discussed and motivated the need for a causal approach to reinforcement learning. We argued that reinforcement learning naturally falls on the interventional rung of...

Causal Reinforcement Learning: A Primer

As part of any honours degree at the University of Cape Town, one is obliged to write a thesis droning on about some topic. Luckily for me, applied mathematics can...

The Do-Calculus

This Series

Faithfulness

In the last dicussion we sought to rigorously define counterfactual statements and distributions in terms of our DAG formalism of causal inference. This appeared fruitful but the theory is certainly...

Reaching Rung 3: Counterfactual Reasoning

In our last discussion we discussed the so-called ‘rung two’ of the ladder of causation, discussing interventions and randomisation in control trials. This is an incredibly important field in the...

Interventions and Multivariate SCMs

Last time we discussed how we can learn causal structure from data and thought about how this relates to machine learning. Specifically, we noticed that having more data in a...

Causality and Machine Learning

Last time we briefly discussed the theory needed to start thinking about how we can learn, in the statistical sense, causal information from ‘dumb’ data. Some key points were that...

Learning Causal Models

In the last episode we developed the first tools we need to develop the theory needed to formalise interventions and counterfactual reasoning. In this article we’ll discuss how we can...

Causal Models

Last time we discussed and motivated the need for a modern theory of causal inference. We developed some of the basic principles necessary to develop this theory, but we have...

A Causal Perspective

What’s the first thing a statistician will say when you dare say the word cause? If you’ve ever taken a statistics class, I have little doubt it was the classic...