Pittsburgh Mind-Body Center

3:30 pm -  5:00 pm, Location:  TBA

"Causation and Prediction"

Richard P. Scheines, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy, Automated Learning and Discovery,
and Human-Computer Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University

Dr. Richard Scheines received his Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1987, and since then has been at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy, Automated Learning and Discovery, and Human-Computer Interaction.  His research interests are broadly on two topics: the connection between causation and statistics and on educational computing. Along with several colleagues at Carnegie Mellon, Scheines has spent 15 years articulating axioms to connect causal structure with statistical independence, characterizing what can and cannot be learned about causal structure under various degrees of background knowledge, and developing algorithms that take data and output the set of causal models that can explain such data.  His work on educational computing involves intelligent tutors for teaching proof construction in formal logic, and in creating and evaluating an online course in Causal and Statistical Reasoning.  Dr. Scheines will discuss the difference between using statistical techniques like regression for prediction and for predicting the effect of an intervention, a distinction usually not made in typical statistical practice.