An Open Letter from Judea Pearl to Nancy Cartwright concerning “Causal...
Dear Nancy, This letter concerns the issue of “causal plurality” which came up in my review of your book “Hunting Causes and Using Them” (Cambridge 2007) and in your recent reply to my review, both in...
View ArticleConrad (Ontario/Canada) on SEM in Epidemiology
Conrad writes: In the recent issue of IJE (http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/176/7/608), Tyler VanderWeele argues that SEM should be used in Epidemiology only when 1) the interest is on a wide...
View ArticleNeyman-Rubin’s model and ASA Causality Prize
We received the following query from Megan Murphy (ASA): Dr. Pearl, I received the following question regarding the Causality in Statistics Education prize on twitter. I’m not sure how to answer this,...
View ArticleOn Structural Equations versus Causal Bayes Networks
We received the following query from Jim Grace, (USGS – National Wetlands Research Center) : Hi Judea, In your 2009 edition of Causality on pages 26-27 you explain your reasoning for now preferring to...
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Flowers of the First Law of Causal Inference
Flower 1 — Seeing counterfactuals in graphs Some critics of structural equations models and their associated graphs have complained that those graphs depict only observable variables but: “You can’t...
View ArticleFlowers of the First Law of Causal Inference (2)
Flower 2 — Conditioning on post-treatment variables In this 2nd flower of the First Law, I share with readers interesting relationships among various ways of extracting information from post-treatment...
View ArticleFlowers of the First Law of Causal Inference (3)
Flower 3 — Generalizing experimental findings Continuing our examination of “the flowers of the First Law” (see previous flowers here and here) this posting looks at one of the most crucial questions...
View ArticleDavid Freedman, Statistics, and Structural Equation Models
(Re-edited: 5/6/15, 4 pm) Michael A Lewis (Hunter College) sent us the following query: Dear Judea, I was reading a book by the late statistician David Freedman and in it he uses the term “response...
View ArticleCausation without Manipulation
The second part of our latest post “David Freedman, Statistics, and Structural Equation Models” (May 6, 2015) has stimulated a lively email discussion among colleagues from several disciplines. In what...
View ArticleWinter Greeting from the UCLA Causality Blog
Friends in causality research, This greeting from the UCLA Causality blog contains: A. An introduction to our newly published book, Causal Inference in Statistics – A Primer, Wiley 2016 (with M....
View ArticleRecollections from the WCE conference at Stanford
On May 21, Kosuke Imai and I participated in a panel on Mediation, at the annual meeting of the West Coast Experiment Conference, organized by Stanford Graduate School of Business...
View ArticleOn the Classification and Subsumption of Causal Models
From Christos Dimitrakakis: >> To be honest, there is such a plethora of causal models, that it is not entirely clear what subsumes what, and which one is equivalent to what. Is there a simple...
View ArticleThe Three Layer Causal Hierarchy
Recent discussions concerning causal mediation gave me the impression that many researchers in the field are not familiar with the ramifications of the Causal Hierarchy, as articulated in Chapter 1 of...
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