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Can you elaborate on this? If agent A interacts with a system and can learn causal relationships, how could agent B who observes all of agent A's experiments no
by jbay808 6y ago
Can you elaborate on this? If agent A interacts with a system and can learn causal relationships, how could agent B who observes all of agent A's experiments not be capable of drawing the same conclusions?
It seems that any theorem that rules out learning causality from observational data alone would also rule out learning causality from any kind of interactions.
Unless you're assuming that agent A "knows" it has free will so its own actions have no cause, while agent B can't tell whether the environment caused agent A's actions or vice-versa. But if that's what the proof hinges on, it's pretty shallow, because agent A has no such guarantee that its own choices have no root cause.
- blackbear_ 6y agoSorry, I was quite sloppy in my previous comment. Agent B certainly can learn everything that A learns from the same observations. What I meant is that you cannot learn from "general" observational data, unless it is structured in a certain way (the randomized controlled trial mentioned in a sibling). RL is able to gather data on its own, while other ML methods must do with what they are given. This means that RL could eventually discover the causal relationships, while non-RL cannot (except if the data comes from a RCT).