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Spotlight
Transportability from Multiple Environments with Limited Experiments: Completeness Results
Elias Bareinboim · Judea Pearl

Thu Dec 11 07:10 AM -- 07:35 AM (PST) @ Level 2, room 210
in Spotlight Session 9: Graphical models spotlights, model selection »
This paper addresses the problem of $mz$-transportability, that is, transferring causal knowledge collected in several heterogeneous domains to a target domain in which only passive observations and limited experimental data can be collected. The paper first establishes a necessary and sufficient condition for deciding the feasibility of $mz$-transportability, i.e., whether causal effects in the target domain are estimable from the information available. It further proves that a previously established algorithm for computing transport formula is in fact complete, that is, failure of the algorithm implies non-existence of a transport formula. Finally, the paper shows that the do-calculus is complete for the $mz$-transportability class.

Author Information

Elias Bareinboim (Purdue University )

Elias Bareinboim is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at UCLA advised by Judea Pearl. He works on the problem of generalizability in causal inference, and more specifically proposed solutions for the problems of selection bias, fusion of experimental and non-experimental knowledge, and external validity (transfer of causal knowledge) in non-parametric settings. Recently, Elias received the "Yahoo Key Scientific Challenges Award 2012" (area of Statistics) and Dissertation Year Fellowship (2013-2014) from UCLA. He holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he worked in the areas of Complex Networks, Artificial Intelligence, and Bioinformatics.

Judea Pearl (UCLA)

Judea Pearl is a professor of computer science and statistics at UCLA. He is a graduate of the Technion, Israel, and has joined the faculty of UCLA in 1970, where he conducts research in artificial intelligence, causal inference and philosophy of science. Pearl has authored three books: Heuristics (1984), Probabilistic Reasoning (1988), and Causality (2000;2009), the latter won the Lakatos Prize from the London School of Economics. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the IEEE, AAAI and the Cognitive Science Society. Pearl received the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute and the 2011 Rumelhart Prize from the Cognitive Science Society. In 2012, he received the Technion's Harvey Prize and the ACM Alan M. Turing Award.

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