Related papers: A Conversation with A. Philip Dawid
In 2011, Judea Pearl received the Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize in Computing, for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning. It includes…
Nancy Flournoy was born in Long Beach, California, on May 4, 1947. After graduating from Polytechnic School in Pasadena in 1965, she earned a B.S. (1969) and M.S. (1971) in biostatistics from UCLA. Between her bachelors and masters degrees,…
The probability that a number in many naturally occurring tables of numerical data has first significant digit $d$ is predicted by Benford's Law ${\rm Prob} (d) = \log_{10} (1 + {\displaystyle{1\over d}}), d = 1, 2 >..., 9$. Illustrations…
The difficulties of detecting association, measuring correlation, and establishing cause and effect have fascinated mankind since time immemorial. Democritus, the Greek philosopher, underscored well the importance and the difficulty of…
Current approaches which are mainly based on the extraction of low-level relations among individual events are limited by the shortage of publicly available labelled data. Therefore, the resulting models perform poorly when applied to a…
My thesis describes the life and work of the mathematician Major Percy Alexander MacMahon (1854-1929). His early life as as a soldier in the Royal Artillery and the events which led to him embarking on a career in mathematical research and…
Statistics comes in two main flavors: frequentist and Bayesian. For historical and technical reasons, frequentist statistics has dominated data analysis in the past; but Bayesian statistics is making a comeback at the forefront of science.…
Inferring the potential consequences of an unobserved event is a fundamental scientific question. To this end, Pearl's celebrated do-calculus provides a set of inference rules to derive an interventional probability from an observational…
University dropout remains a persistent challenge in higher education systems, yet causal evidence on the mechanisms triggering early disengagement is limited. This study estimates the causal effect of first-time academic failure on…
When teaching and discussing statistical assumptions, our focus is oftentimes placed on how to test and address potential violations rather than the effects of violating assumptions on the estimates produced by our statistical models. The…
Cyclic systems of dichotomous random variables have played a prominent role in contextuality research, describing such experimental paradigms as the Klyachko-Can-Binicoglu-Shumovky, Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bell, and Leggett-Garg ones in…
Over the past two decades, the rapid surge in data-intensive computational techniques for statistical modeling may have had the effect of diminishing the use of applied mathematics in causal scientific inquiry. In this paper, co-authored by…
Jerome H. Friedman was born in Yreka, California, USA, on December 29, 1939. He received his high school education at Yreka High School, then spent two years at Chico State College before transferring to the University of California at…
Since the initial work by Ashenfelter and Card in 1985, the use of difference-in-differences (DID) study design has become widespread. However, as pointed out in the literature, this popular quasi-experimental design also suffers estimation…
Causal discovery, the learning of causality in a data mining scenario, has been of strong scientific and theoretical interest as a starting point to identify "what causes what?" Contingent on assumptions and a proper learning algorithm, it…
Detlef D\"urr (1951-2021) was a theoretical and mathematical physicist who worked particularly on the foundations of quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, and statistical mechanics. This piece is a rather personal look back at him and his…
We extend the theory of d-separation to cases in which data instances are not independent and identically distributed. We show that applying the rules of d-separation directly to the structure of probabilistic models of relational data…
We propose a novel statistical method for testing the results of anomaly detection (AD) under domain adaptation (DA), which we call CAD-DA -- controllable AD under DA. The distinct advantage of the CAD-DA lies in its ability to control the…
I first met Leo Breiman in 1979 at the beginning of his third career, Professor of Statistics at Berkeley. He obtained his PhD with Lo\'eve at Berkeley in 1957. His first career was as a probabilist in the Mathematics Department at UCLA.…
The Bayesian statistical paradigm uses the language of probability to express uncertainty about the phenomena that generate observed data. Probability distributions thus characterize Bayesian analysis, with the rules of probability used to…