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Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference First Edition Edition

3.8 out of 5 stars 13 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0521773621
ISBN-10: 0521773628
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 400 pages
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press; First Edition edition (March 13, 2000)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0521773628
  • ISBN-13: 978-0521773621
  • Product Dimensions: 7 x 1.1 x 10 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,265,500 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

Format: Hardcover
Judea Pearl and his colleagues at UCLA (and elsewhere) have published a large number of papers and written unpublished reports over the past 15 years, in which they have developed a modern, analytical approach to causation. Many of these are in somewhat obscure publications, and so it is especially helpful to have the most important of them collected together in this volume. Pearl has edited, written new chapters and connecting prose, to weave this summary of a substantial amount of research.
Although the dust-jacket suggests that only modest mathematics is needed, and although this is technically true, it is misleading, because the whole area requires a sophistication of thought that goes well beyond the simplicity of the tools. Nonetheless, there is currently no other volume that is as easy to read as this, and summarizes so much material so compactly.
It is possible that the new vision of causal analysis developed by Spirtes, Scheines, Glymour, Pearl, Robins, Verma, Heckerman, Meek, and others, will have profound effect on how we analyze research data. If so, this book will be necessary reading for decades to come.
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Format: Hardcover
Judea Pearl is one of the leading researchers in the topic of causality. What is causality? In the exploration of statistical data we are often able to find relationships or correlations between two variables. We are often tempted to attribute the results of one variable, say A as an outcome (being high or low)that is due to the result (high or low) of the other, say B. We want to say that B is the cause of the outcome of A. Significant correlation by itself only suggests relationships. It cannot tell you whether A causes B or B causes A or neither. Causality is the study of designing experiments to allow you to determine if a relationship has a cause and effect. The subject matter is very philosophical and somewhat controversial. But a lot of research effort has gone into providing mathematical rigor to the concept. Pearl is one of those rare scientists who can contribute to such theory and explain it. But as Aickin suggests in his amazon review this is not a subject for a novice. Previous exposure to statistical methods such as correlation and regression is important to a clear understanding of this book.
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Format: Hardcover
A great text, if for no other reason than the fact that it fills an important niche. Pearl does an excellent job of delineating causal models as both philosophical and statistical problems. I found the coverage of latent variable models particularly useful.
My only complaint is Pearl often makes assumptions without justifying them sufficiently. Usually, the assumptions made are reasonable or of negligible consequence, but at other times, the veracity of the assumptions is arguably core matter of the discussion. The net effect is a feeling of reading a brilliant, detailed exposition of what causal models imply observationally, undermined by doubts about the appropriateness of causality as a concept at all.
Overall, however, this a wonderful text that should be useful to anyone interested in causality or statistical modeling.
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Format: Hardcover
The scientific research community has adopted rigorous methods to eliminate the need for subjective judgments about many things, but when it comes to testing whether X causes Y, they revert to intuition and hand-waving. This book makes a strong argument that we shouldn't accept that. It demonstrates that it is possible to turn intuitions about causation into hypotheses that are unambiguous and testable.

But the style is sufficiently dense and dry we will need some additional books with more practical styles before these ideas become widely understood. The style is fairly good by the standards of books whose main goal is rigorous proof, but it's still hard work to learn a large number of new concepts that are mostly referred to by terse symbols whose meaning can't be found via a glossary or index. Pearl occasionally introduces a memorable word, such as do(x), the way a software engineer who wants readable code would, but mostly sticks to single-character symbols that seem unreasonably hard (at least for us programmers who are used to descriptive names) to remember.

If you're uncertain whether reading this book is worth the effort, I strongly recommend reading the afterword first. It ought to have been used as the introduction, and without it many readers will be left wondering why they should believe they will be rewarded for slogging through so much dry material.
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Format: Hardcover
I take issue with the previous reviewer. Pearl does not assume that the modeller is able, a priori, to determine what the correct model is. Instead, Pearl asks what conclusions can be drawn if the modeller is able to substantiate only parts of the model. By systematically changing those parts, he then obtains a full picture of what modeling assumptions "must" be substantiated before causal inferences can be derived from nonexperimental data. An anslysis of assumptions is not a license to abuse them.
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Format: Hardcover
Choice (November 00) calls both Pearl's Causality (and Juarrero's Dynamics in Action, which Choice reviews together with Pearl), a "radically new perspective on causation and human behavior... Pearl critically reviews the major literature on causation, both in philosohy and in applied statistics in the social sciences. His formal models, nicely illustrated by practical examples, show the power of positing objectdively real causation connetions, counter to Hume's skepticism, which has dominated discussions of causality in both analytic philosophy and statistical analysis. Probabilities, Pearl argues, reflect subjective degrees of belief, whereas causal relations describe objective physical constraints. He reveals the role of substantive causes in statistical analyses in examples from medicine, economics, and policy decisions. "Both works are highly ambitious in rejecting traditional views. Although the arguments ar meticulous and represent intensive research, their criticisms of mainstream traditions are destined to arouse controversy... Juarrero and Pearl's books will greatly interest philosophers and scientists who are concerned with causality and the explanation of human behavior."
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