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Judea Pearl wrote a book, Causality, introducing Bayesian networks to address the inadequacy, even refusal, of Fisher's statistics to model causes and effects.
by hughw 3y ago
Judea Pearl wrote a book, Causality, introducing Bayesian networks to address the inadequacy, even refusal, of Fisher's statistics to model causes and effects. Here's a lecture he gave almost 30 years ago [1] that's entertaining and accessible. He mentions the tobacco issue and Fisher specifically.
[1] http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/causality2-epilogue.pdf http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/causality2-epilogue.pdf
- dekhn 3y agoThanks. I've never been able to understand the math behind Pearl but I appreciated the little diagram in the Fisher smoking section that clearly lays out causality of models diagrammatically.
- jldugger 3y agoI think it was Pearl's Book of Why that went into far more detail about how it was decided that tobacco causes cancer from purely observational data. The technique was... relatively convoluted, and supposedly Fischer fought tooth and nail against Bayesian techniques required to adequately answer any such causal questions.