Philosopher

Richard Scheines studies causal discovery: learning causal structure from statistical evidence under explicit assumptions. With Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour and collaborators, he developed the Tetrad research programme, connecting causal inference, algorithms and machine learning.^[ref]

In Causation, Prediction, and Search by Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour and Richard Scheines, the collaborators examine how patterns of conditional independence constrain a causal directed acyclic graph. The connection is informative but conditional: faithfulness of a directed acyclic graph, restrictions on unobserved causes and the correctness of the independence information affect what can be identified. Different graphs can remain indistinguishable under Markov equivalence of directed acyclic graphs, so observational data need not select one unique causal story.^[ref]

Peter Spirtes develops mathematical and computational methods for causal discovery. His work asks which causal conclusions can be recovered from statistical data and background knowledge when fully controlled experiments are unavailable, and how to turn the corresponding guarantees into practical algorithms.^[ref]

With Clark Glymour and Richard Scheines, he coauthored Causation, Prediction, and Search by Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour and Richard Scheines. One important example is the PC algorithm, which uses conditional independence information to remove candidate edges and orient some of the remaining ones. Under its assumptions, the resulting graph represents an equivalence class of possible causal explanations; it need not recover every arrow in a unique graph. Making these limitations explicit is part of the method's contribution, rather than an exception to it.^[ref]

Author of The Analyst by George Berkeley, a critique of the foundations of calculus.

An American philosopher associated here with Peirce's law.

Philosopher whose new riddle of induction concerns the selection of predicates for projection beyond examined cases.^[ref]

Portrait: University of Chicago photographic archive.

Institutional biography: Harvard memorial, with portrait.

Coauthor of work comparing the material ontologies of Bohmian mechanics and the GRW model.

Author of Quantum Probability and Decision Theory, Revisited by David Wallace.

Author homepage with portrait: sites.pitt.edu/~dmw121/

Institutional profile and portrait: Carnegie Mellon University.

Author of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume.

Portrait: Public-domain portrait, hosted by Wikimedia Commons.