Carnegie Mellon philosophy professor to give presentation Nov. 13 Carnegie Mellon philosophy professor to give presentation Nov. 13

"A Framework for Causal Discovery from Experimental and non-Experimental Data" will be presented by Peter Spirtes, professor, Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, Carnegie Mellon University, at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 13, in 142 RSC. The lecture is sponsored by the WSU Department of Philosophy, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics.

Over the last 30 years, philosophers, computer scientists and statisticians have elaborated a method of representing causal systems using directed graphs. They have also developed algorithms that can be used to infer features of unknown causal systems from experimental and non-experimental data, and to infer the effects of experimental manipulations from known causal systems, even when some of the relevant variables have not been measured.

Spirtes will give an overview of the graphical representation, the fundamental assumptions of the causal inference algorithms employ and some current applications and limitations of the algorithms.

Go to http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-spirtes.php for more information about Spirtes.