Judea Pearl: Data

Judea Pearl is Computer scientist. Explore interesting quotes on data.

Judea Pearl: 18 quotes0 likes

“The research questions that motivate most quantitative studies in the health, social and behavioral sciences are not statistical but causal in nature. For example, what is the efficacy of a given drug in a given population? Whether data can prove an employer guilty of hiring discrimination? What fraction of past crimes could have been avoided by a given policy? What was the cause of death of a given individual, in a specific incident? These are causal questions because they require some knowledge of the data-generating process; they cannot be computed from the data alone.”

Pearl, Judea (2008) "Causal Inference," in: Pearl, Judea. The science and ethics of causal modeling. (2010).

“Traditional statistics is strong in devising ways of describing data and inferring distributional parameters from sample. Causal inference requires two additional ingredients: a science-friendly language for articulating causal knowledge, and a mathematical machinery for processing that knowledge, combining it with data and drawing new causal conclusions about a phenomenon.”

Pearl, Judea. "Causal inference in statistics: An overview." Statistics Surveys 3 (2009): 96-146.

“Haavelmo was the ﬁrst to recognize the capacity of economic models to guide policies. This paper describes some of the barriers that Haavelmo’s ideas have had (and still have) to overcome, and lays out a logical framework that has evolved from Haavelmo’s insight and matured into a coherent and comprehensive account of the relationships between theory, data and policy questions. The mathematical tools that emerge from this framework now enable investigators to answer complex policy and counterfactual questions using simple routines, some by mere inspection of the model’s structure.”

Judea Pearl, "Trygve Haavelmo and the emergence of causal calculus." University of California Los Angeles, Computer Science Department, CA. 2012.