Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T19:43:37.462Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Comorbid science?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2010

David Danks
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. ddanks@cmu.eduhttp://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-danks.phpsfancsal@andrew.cmu.educg09@andrew.cmu.eduhttp://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-glymour.phpscheines@cmu.eduhttp://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-scheines.php Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pittsburgh, PA 15213.
Stephen Fancsali
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. ddanks@cmu.eduhttp://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-danks.phpsfancsal@andrew.cmu.educg09@andrew.cmu.eduhttp://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-glymour.phpscheines@cmu.eduhttp://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-scheines.php
Clark Glymour
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. ddanks@cmu.eduhttp://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-danks.phpsfancsal@andrew.cmu.educg09@andrew.cmu.eduhttp://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-glymour.phpscheines@cmu.eduhttp://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-scheines.php Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pittsburgh, PA 15213.
Richard Scheines
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. ddanks@cmu.eduhttp://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-danks.phpsfancsal@andrew.cmu.educg09@andrew.cmu.eduhttp://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-glymour.phpscheines@cmu.eduhttp://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-scheines.php

Abstract

We agree with Cramer et al.'s goal of the discovery of causal relationships, but we argue that the authors' characterization of latent variable models (as deployed for such purposes) overlooks a wealth of extant possibilities. We provide a preliminary analysis of their data, using existing algorithms for causal inference and for the specification of latent variable models.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1.

Authors are listed in alphabetical order; all contributed equally to this commentary.

References

Lacerda, G., Spirtes, P., Ramsey, J. & Hoyer, P. (2008) Discovering cyclic causal models by independent components analysis. In: Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, ed. McAllester, D. & Nicholson, A., pp. 366–74. AUAI Press.Google Scholar
Meek, C. (1997) Graphical models: Selecting causal and statistical models. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University.Google Scholar
Pearl, J. & Dechter, R. (1996) Identifying independencies in causal graphs with feedback. In: Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, ed. Horvitz, E. & Jensen, F., pp. 420–42. Morgan Kaufmann.Google Scholar
Ramsey, J., Zhang, J. & Spirtes, P. (2006) Adjacency-faithfulness and conservative causal inference. In: Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, ed. Dechter, R. & Richardson, T., pp. 401408. AUAI Press.Google Scholar
Richardson, T. S. (1996) A discovery algorithm for directed cyclic graphs. In: Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, ed. Horvitz, E. & Jensen, F., pp. 454–61. Morgan Kaufmann.Google Scholar
Silva, R., Scheines, R., Glymour, C. & Spirtes, P. (2006) Learning the structure of linear latent variable models. Journal of Machine Learning Research 7:191246.Google Scholar
Spirtes, P. & Glymour, C. (1991) A fast algorithm for discovering sparse causal graphs. Social Science Computer Review 9:6272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spirtes, P., Glymour, C. & Scheines, R. (1993) Causation, prediction, and search. Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar