Bayesian Nets and Causality: Philosophical and Computational Foundations

Bayesian Nets and Causality: Philosophical and Computational Foundations PDF Author: Jon Williamson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191523933
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Bayesian nets are widely used in artificial intelligence as a calculus for causal reasoning, enabling machines to make predictions, perform diagnoses, take decisions and even to discover causal relationships. But many philosophers have criticised and ultimately rejected the central assumption on which such work is based - the Causal Markov Condition. So should Bayesian nets be abandoned? What explains their success in artificial intelligence? This book argues that the Causal Markov Condition holds as a default rule: it often holds but may need to be repealed in the face of counterexamples. Thus Bayesian nets are the right tool to use by default but naively applying them can lead to problems. The book develops a systematic account of causal reasoning and shows how Bayesian nets can be coherently employed to automate the reasoning processes of an artificial agent. The resulting framework for causal reasoning involves not only new algorithms but also new conceptual foundations. Probability and causality are treated as mental notions - part of an agent's belief state. Yet probability and causality are also objective - different agents with the same background knowledge ought to adopt the same or similar probabilistic and causal beliefs. This book, aimed at researchers and graduate students in computer science, mathematics and philosophy, provides a general introduction to these philosophical views as well as an exposition of the computational techniques that they motivate.

Bayesian Nets and Causality: Philosophical and Computational Foundations

Bayesian Nets and Causality: Philosophical and Computational Foundations PDF Author: Jon Williamson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191523933
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bayesian nets are widely used in artificial intelligence as a calculus for causal reasoning, enabling machines to make predictions, perform diagnoses, take decisions and even to discover causal relationships. But many philosophers have criticised and ultimately rejected the central assumption on which such work is based - the Causal Markov Condition. So should Bayesian nets be abandoned? What explains their success in artificial intelligence? This book argues that the Causal Markov Condition holds as a default rule: it often holds but may need to be repealed in the face of counterexamples. Thus Bayesian nets are the right tool to use by default but naively applying them can lead to problems. The book develops a systematic account of causal reasoning and shows how Bayesian nets can be coherently employed to automate the reasoning processes of an artificial agent. The resulting framework for causal reasoning involves not only new algorithms but also new conceptual foundations. Probability and causality are treated as mental notions - part of an agent's belief state. Yet probability and causality are also objective - different agents with the same background knowledge ought to adopt the same or similar probabilistic and causal beliefs. This book, aimed at researchers and graduate students in computer science, mathematics and philosophy, provides a general introduction to these philosophical views as well as an exposition of the computational techniques that they motivate.

Bayesian Nets and Causality: Philosophical and Computational Foundations

Bayesian Nets and Causality: Philosophical and Computational Foundations PDF Author: Jon Williamson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019853079X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Bayesian nets are used in artificial intelligence as a calculus for causal reasoning, enabling machines to make predictions perform diagnoses, take decisions and even to discover causal relationships. This book brings together how to automate reasoning in artificial intelligence, and the nature of causality and probability in philosophy.

The Oxford Handbook of Causation

The Oxford Handbook of Causation PDF Author: Helen Beebee
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191629464
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 1369

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Book Description
Causation is a central topic in many areas of philosophy. In metaphysics, philosophers want to know what causation is, and how it is related to laws of nature, probability, action, and freedom of the will. In epistemology, philosophers investigate how causal claims can be inferred from statistical data, and how causation is related to perception, knowledge and explanation. In the philosophy of mind, philosophers want to know whether and how the mind can be said to have causal efficacy, and in ethics, whether there is a moral distinction between acts and omissions and whether the moral value of an act can be judged according to its consequences. And causation is a contested concept in other fields of enquiry, such as biology, physics, and the law. This book provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of these and other topics, as well as the history of the causation debate from the ancient Greeks to the logical empiricists. The chapters provide surveys of contemporary debates, while often also advancing novel and controversial claims; and each includes a comprehensive bibliography and suggestions for further reading. The book is thus the most comprehensive source of information about causation currently available, and will be invaluable for upper-level undergraduates through to professional philosophers.

Computational Intelligence in Archaeology

Computational Intelligence in Archaeology PDF Author: Barcelo, Juan A.
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1599044919
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Provides analytical theories offered by innovative artificial intelligence computing methods in the archaeological domain.

Scientific Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery

Scientific Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery PDF Author: Mohamed Medhat Gaber
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642027881
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Mohamed Medhat Gaber “It is not my aim to surprise or shock you – but the simplest way I can summarise is to say that there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until – in a visible future – the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied” by Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001) 1Overview This book suits both graduate students and researchers with a focus on discovering knowledge from scienti c data. The use of computational power for data analysis and knowledge discovery in scienti c disciplines has found its roots with the re- lution of high-performance computing systems. Computational science in physics, chemistry, and biology represents the rst step towards automation of data analysis tasks. The rational behind the developmentof computationalscience in different - eas was automating mathematical operations performed in those areas. There was no attention paid to the scienti c discovery process. Automated Scienti c Disc- ery (ASD) [1–3] represents the second natural step. ASD attempted to automate the process of theory discovery supported by studies in philosophy of science and cognitive sciences. Although early research articles have shown great successes, the area has not evolved due to many reasons. The most important reason was the lack of interaction between scientists and the automating systems.

Causality, Meaningful Complexity and Embodied Cognition

Causality, Meaningful Complexity and Embodied Cognition PDF Author: A. Carsetti
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 904813529X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Arturo Carsetti According to molecular Biology, true invariance (life) can exist only within the framework of ongoing autonomous morphogenesis and vice versa. With respect to this secret dialectics, life and cognition appear as indissolubly interlinked. In this sense, for instance, the inner articulation of conceptual spaces appears to be linked to an inner functional development based on a continuous activity of selection and “anchorage” realised on semantic grounds. It is the work of “invention” and g- eration (in invariance), linked with the “rooting” of meaning, which determines the evolution, the leaps and punctuated equilibria, the conditions related to the unfo- ing of new modalities of invariance, an invariance which is never simple repetition and which springs on each occasion through deep-level processes of renewal and recovery. The selection perpetrated by meaning reveals its autonomy aboveall in its underpinning, in an objective way, the ongoing choice of these new modalities. As such it is not, then, concerned only with the game of “possibles”, offering itself as a simple channel for pure chance, but with providing a channel for the articulation of the “ le” in the humus of a semantic (and embodied) net in order to prepare the necessary conditionsfor a continuousrenewal and recoveryof original creativity. In effect, it is this autonomy in inventing new possible modules of incompressibility whichdeterminestheactualemergenceofnew(andtrue)creativity,whichalsotakes place through the “narration” of the effected construction.

Bayesian Networks

Bayesian Networks PDF Author: Timo Koski
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119964954
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Bayesian Networks: An Introduction provides a self-contained introduction to the theory and applications of Bayesian networks, a topic of interest and importance for statisticians, computer scientists and those involved in modelling complex data sets. The material has been extensively tested in classroom teaching and assumes a basic knowledge of probability, statistics and mathematics. All notions are carefully explained and feature exercises throughout. Features include: An introduction to Dirichlet Distribution, Exponential Families and their applications. A detailed description of learning algorithms and Conditional Gaussian Distributions using Junction Tree methods. A discussion of Pearl's intervention calculus, with an introduction to the notion of see and do conditioning. All concepts are clearly defined and illustrated with examples and exercises. Solutions are provided online. This book will prove a valuable resource for postgraduate students of statistics, computer engineering, mathematics, data mining, artificial intelligence, and biology. Researchers and users of comparable modelling or statistical techniques such as neural networks will also find this book of interest.

Causality in the Sciences

Causality in the Sciences PDF Author: Phyllis McKay Illari
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199574138
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 953

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Book Description
Why do ideas of how mechanisms relate to causality and probability differ so much across the sciences? Can progress in understanding the tools of causal inference in some sciences lead to progress in others? This book tackles these questions and others concerning the use of causality in the sciences.

Alternative Approaches to Causation

Alternative Approaches to Causation PDF Author: Yafeng Shan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192863487
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This volume focuses on alternatives to the two main philosophical approaches to causation: mechanistic explanation, and explanation in terms of difference-making. It explores the pluralistic, the fictionalist, the inferentialist, and the informational approaches, as well as the application of various approaches to natural and social sciences.

The Laws of Belief

The Laws of Belief PDF Author: Wolfgang Spohn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191629278
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Wolfgang Spohn presents the first full account of the dynamic laws of belief, by means of ranking theory. This book is his long-awaited presentation of ranking theory and its ramifications. He motivates and introduces the basic notion of a ranking function, which recognises degrees of belief and at the same time accounts for belief simpliciter. He provides a measurement theory for ranking functions, accounts for auto-epistemology in ranking-theoretic terms, and explicates the basic notion of a (deductive or non-deductive) reason. The rich philosophical applications of Spohn's theory include: a new account of lawlikeness, an account of ceteris paribus laws, a new perspective on dispositions, a rich and detailed theory of deterministic causation, an understanding of natural modalities as an objectification of epistemic modalities, an account of the experiential basis of belief—and thus a restructuring of the debate on foundationalism and coherentism (and externalism and contextualism)—and, finally, a revival of fundamental a priori principles of reason fathoming the basics of empiricism and the relation between reason and truth, and concluding in a proof of a weak principle of causality. All this is accompanied by thorough comparative discussions, on a general level as well as within each topic, and in particular with respect to probability theory.