Connectionists: NIPS Causality and feature selection workshop

[Isabelle Guyon]

          NIPS*06 Workshop - Whistler, BC, December 8, 2006

                        "Causality and Feature Selection"

======================================================

http://research.ihost.com/cws2006

Call for contributions:
---
Extended abstracts (1 to 4 pages long) .
A selection of the submitted abstracts will be accepted as oral or
poster presentations. The selected contributions will be
invited to publish an extended version for the workshop proceedings.

Important Dates:
---
Deadline for submissions:   November 11, 2006

Notification of acceptance: November 15, 2006

Background:
---
This workshop explores the use of causality with predictive models
in order to assess the results of given actions. Such assessment is
essential in many domains, including epidemiology, medicine,
ecology, economy, sociology and business. Predictive models simply
based on event correlations do not model mechanisms. They allow us
to make predictions in a stationary environment (no change in the
distribution of all the variables), but do not allow us to predict
the consequence of given actions. For instance, smoking and coughing
are both predictive of respiratory disease. One is a cause and the
other a symptom. Acting on the cause can change the disease state,
but not acting on the symptom. Understanding the effect of
interventions has been the goal of most causal models but their
complexity has limited their use to a few hundreds variables.
Feature selection on the other hand can handle thousands of
variables at the same time but does not make a difference between
causes and symptoms. By confronting the hypothesis underlying
causality and feature selection approaches, this workshop aims at
investigating new approaches to extract causal relationships from
data.

We invite therefore contributions in the area of causality and/or
feature selection. Applications to other fields such as
econometrics, computational biology, physics or manufacturing are
welcome.

For more details, please go to http://research.ihost.com/cws2006

Organizers:
---
* Andre Elisseeff, IBM Zurich Research Lab, Switzerland
* Constantin Aliferis, Discovery Systems Laboratory, Vanderbilt 
University, USA
* Isabelle Guyon, Clopinet, USA