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.
Clark Glymour is Alumni University Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon
University, John Pace Eminent Scholar and Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for
Human and Machine Cognition of the University of Florida, and Valtz Family Professor at
the University of California, San Diego.
543 pages