book announcement--Spirtes

[Jud Wolfskill]

I thought readers of the Connectionist List might be interested in this
book.  For more information please visit
http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/SPICHF00.  Thank you!

Best,
Jud

Causation, Prediction, and Search
second edition
Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour, and Richard Scheines

What assumptions and methods allow us to turn observations into causal
knowledge, and how can even incomplete causal knowledge be used in planning
and prediction to influence and control our environment? In this book Peter
Spirtes, Clark Glymour, and Richard Scheines address these questions using
the formalism of Bayes networks, with results that have been applied in
diverse areas of research in the social, behavioral, and physical sciences.

The authors show that although experimental and observational study designs
may not always permit the same inferences, they are subject to uniform
principles. They axiomatize the connection between causal structure and
probabilistic independence, explore several varieties of causal
indistinguishability, formulate a theory of manipulation, and develop
asymptotically reliable procedures for searching over equivalence classes
of causal models, including models of categorical data and structural
equation models with and without latent variables.

The authors show that the relationship between causality and probability
can also help to clarify such diverse topics in statistics as the
comparative power of experimentation versus observation, Simpson's paradox,
errors in regression models, retrospective versus prospective sampling, and
variable selection.

The second edition contains a new introduction and an extensive survey of
advances and applications that have appeared since the first edition was
published in 1993.

Peter Spirtes is Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Automated
Learning and Discovery, Carnegie Mellon University. Clark Glymour is Alumni
University Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University and Valtz
Family Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego.
He is also Distinguished External Member of the Center for Human and
Machine Cognition at the University of West Florida, and Adjunct Professor
of Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of
Pittsburgh. Richard Scheines is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the
Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, and at the Human Computer
Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

7 x 9, 496 pp., 225 illus., cloth ISBN 0-262-19440-6
Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series
A Bradford Book
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