Archive of posts with category 'machine-learning'

Predicting Protein Function with DeepChain

One of the most exciting applications of advancements in artificial intelligence has been the modelling of protein structures and protein folding. Last year DeepMind announced their AlphaFold project, which claims...

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 with a Model

Where we are Up to this point we have discussed methods primarily relying on the learning of value functions, usually approximating these with some neural network. That is, our focus...

Learning with a Policy

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms are a class of algorithms which do not use the transition probability information to train and make decisions. In a sense, they are a class of...