{"id":1147,"date":"2013-07-19T09:30:28","date_gmt":"2013-07-19T09:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/?p=1147"},"modified":"2013-07-23T15:09:36","modified_gmt":"2013-07-23T15:09:36","slug":"what-im-reading-if-correlation-doesnt-imply-causation-then-what-does","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/2013\/07\/19\/what-im-reading-if-correlation-doesnt-imply-causation-then-what-does\/","title":{"rendered":"What I&#8217;m Reading: If correlation doesn&#8217;t imply causation, then what does?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Nielsen, author of <a href=\"http:\/\/fcaw.library.umass.edu\/F\/?func=direct&amp;doc_number=011905911&amp;doc_library=FCL01\"><em>Reinventing discovery: The new era of networked science<\/em><\/a> wrote a great piece explaining, in part, the theory of <a href=\"http:\/\/ftp.cs.ucla.edu\/pub\/stat_ser\/R212.pdf\">causal calculus, introduced by Judea Pearl<\/a>. Nielsen describes the three important ideas of causal calculus: <em>causal models, causal conditional probabilities,<\/em> and<em> directional separation (or d-separation). <\/em>The &#8216;clever imaginative leap&#8217; that causal calculus takes, as Nielsen explains it, is that the method establishes a set of rules that help us infer causation, even when we&#8217;re unable to run a randomized, controlled experiment. Potentially powerful stuff!<\/p>\n<p>Want a little practice with these ideas? Nielsen includes optional exercises for the reader (I glossed over them, admittedly), and tackles problems that he has with the model. This has lead to a very rich comments section &#8211; make sure you check it out if you want to dig deeper into this topic, and see what other great minds think of Nielsen&#8217;s work!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Nielsen, author of Reinventing discovery: The new era of networked science wrote a great piece explaining, in part, the theory of causal calculus, introduced by Judea Pearl. Nielsen describes the three important ideas of causal calculus: causal models, causal conditional probabilities, and directional separation (or d-separation). The &#8216;clever imaginative &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":275,"featured_media":1055,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hfj-library","column","threecol","has-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/275"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1147"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1186,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions\/1186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}