80-625 Foundations of Causation and Machine Learning
12 units, Carnegie Mellon University
How can we define causality? Does smoking cause cancer? Can one find causality from observational data without temporal information? In our daily life and science, people often attempt to answer such causal questions for the purpose of understanding, proper manipulation of systems, and robust prediction under interventions. In the past decades, interesting advances were made in machine learning, philosophy, statistics, and economics for tackling long-standing causality problems, and a number of researchers have been recognized with the Turing Award (to Pearl in 2012) the Nobel Prize (to Granger in 2003 and to Sims in 2011). This course is primarily concerned with historical and technical developments of modern causality research, focusing particularly on how to discover causality from observational data and how to infer the causal effect of one variable on another. Thinking more broadly, causal analysis is a particular branch of unsupervised multivariate analysis. Accordingly, this course also provides a big picture of the foundations of causation and unsupervised machine learning. We start with unsupervised learning and multivariate statistical analysis problems including factor analysis, principal component analysis, and independent component analysis, and formulate their assumptions, develop their solutions, and study their connections with causal analysis. Finally, we investigate how the causal perspective helps in solving advanced machine learning or artificial intelligence problems, including transfer learning, image-to-image translation, reinforcement learning, and unsupervised deep learning.
Prerequisites: none listed
Offered: Fall 2026, Fall 2025
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