Speaker: Jonas Peters, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Location: new meeting room at the Department of Biostatistics, Domus Medica (second floor) Coffee/tea is served from 14:15.

Title: Causality and Prediction

Abstract: Causal models are known to be stable with respect to distributional shifts such as interventions. In this talk, we discuss two ideas. (1) The method of Invariant Causal Prediction turns this principle around and learns causal structure by searching for invariant models. (2) We introduce CausalKinetiX, a framework that trades off invariance and predictability in dynamical systems. The two methods are applied to gene data (predicting the effect of gene deletions in yeast) and data from metabolic networks (learning ODE models from heterogeneous experiments), respectively. No prior knowledge about causality is required.

(1a) J. Peters, P. Bühlmann, N. Meinshausen: Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (with discussion) 78(5):947-1012, 2016.
(1b) N. Meinshausen, A. Hauser, J. Mooij, P. Versteeg, J. Peters, P. Bühlmann: Causal inference from gene perturbation experiments: methods, software and validation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(27):7361-7368, 2016.
(2) N. Pfister, S. Bauer, J. Peters: Identifying Causal Structure in Large-Scale Kinetic Systems, arXiv 1810.11776.

Organizer: Oslo Centre for Biostatistics and Epidemiology (OCBE), Research group in Statistics and Biostatistics, Dept. of Mathematics, UiO and Big Insight

Contact persons: Manuela Zucknick and Jon Michael Gran