Talk on Beyond Correlation- Counterfactual Reasoning, Causality and Inference by Tanmayee Narendra

Date: 28th, March, 2018

Time: 5:00 pm

Venue: Room 134, Old Acad. Block, IIIT-Bangalore

Abstract:

Consider the following questions-

  1. How can we test the effectiveness of a drug as a treatment for a particular disease? In other words, how can we know that the drug can cause the disease to be cured?
  2. Given the circumstances, how did a person die? Or, what was the cause of death of the person? If the circumstances were different in some way, would the person still be dead?
  3. How many crimes have been avoided after the implementation of a particular policy? In other words, did a particular policy cause a decrease in the number of crimes?

All of the above questions are causal rather than associational, and finding answers to these questions requires some knowledge about the data generating process.

Causality and causal inference is a new, emerging area of research that aims to answer these kinds of questions. It cuts across disciplines, and there are several interesting, open questions yet to be answered. This talk is split into two parts - The first part will focus on theoretical aspects of Causality, Inference and Counterfactual Reasoning. The second part will be about how concepts in causal inference have helped in solving a wide variety of problems in other disciplines.

About the Speaker:

Tanmayee is a Research Software Engineer at IBM Research AI. She obtained her Master’s degree from IIIT Bangalore in 2017. Her Master’s thesis was on the methods for empirical validation of causal models whose true underlying structures are unknown. Previously, she has worked at Siemens R&D and as a Visiting Student in MIT Media Lab under Prof Sandy Pentland. She has also worked with Fields of View and Medialab Amsterdam in developing a serious game on solid waste management in Bangalore. Her research interests include Causal Inference, Reasoning, Conversational Systems and their applications.

Link to the slides
Link to the references- shared by Tanmayee