80-223 Causality and Probability

9 units, Carnegie Mellon University

Does smoking cause cancer What causes global warming Would World War II happen if World War I had never happened In our daily life and science, people often attempt to answer such causal questions, and probability theory, as a mathematical model of uncertainty, serves as a fundamental tool. This course explores the history of causality and probability and the basic methodologies for causal inference and statistical analysis. In particular, we will study what causality is, how it is related to and different from correlation, the relationship between causality and regression, the benefit of using causal knowledge, the classical ways to find causal relations, when it is possible to achieve so from purely observational data, and machine learning methods for discovering causal structure.

Prerequisites: none listed

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