Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Jurnal
Jurnal
The Book of Why The holdup was the specter of a latent factor, perhaps some-
The New Science of Cause and Effect thing genetic, that might cause both lung cancer and a crav-
Judea Pearl and Dana Macken- ing for tobacco. If the latent factor were responsible for
zie lung cancer, limiting cigarette smoking would not prevent
Basic Books, 2018 the disease. Naturally, tobacco companies were fond of
432 pages this explanation, but it was also advocated by the promi-
ISBN-13: 978-0465097609 nent statistician Ronald A. Fisher, co-inventor of the so-
called gold standard of experimentation, the Randomized
Judea Pearl is on a mission to Controlled Trial (RCT).
change the way we interpret Subjects in an RCT on smoking and lung cancer would
data. An eminent professor have been assigned to smoke or not on the flip of a coin.
of computer science, Pearl has The study had the potential to disqualify a latent factor
documented his research and opinions in scholarly books as the primary cause of lung cancer and elevate cigarettes
and papers. Now, he has made his ideas accessible to to the leading suspect. Since a smoking RCT would have
a broad audience in The Book of Why: The New Science been unethical, however, researchers made do with ob-
of Cause and Effect, co-authored with science writer Dana servational studies showing association, and demurred on
Mackenzie. With the release of this historically grounded the question of cause and effect for decades.
and thought-provoking book, Pearl leaps from the ivory Was the problem simply that the tools available in the
tower into the real world. 1950s and 1960s were too limited in scope? Pearl address-
The Book of Why takes aim at perceived limitations of es that question in his three-step Ladder of Causation,
observational studies, whose underlying data are found in which organizes inferential methods in terms of the prob-
nature and not controlled by researchers. Many believe lems they can solve. The bottom rung is for model-free
that an observational study can elucidate association but statistical methods that rely strictly on association or cor-
not cause and effect. It cannot tell you why. relation. The middle rung is for interventions that allow
Perhaps the most famous example concerns the impact for the measurement of cause and effect. The top rung is
of smoking on health. By the mid 1950s, researchers had for counterfactual analysis, the exploration of alternative
established a strong association between smoking and realities.
lung cancer. Only in 1984, however, did the US govern- Early scientific inquiries about the relationship between
ment mandate the phrase “smoking causes lung cancer.” smoking and lung cancer relied on the bottom rung,
model-free statistical methods whose modern analogs
Lisa Goldberg is a co-director of the Consortium for Data Analytics in Risk and dominate the analysis of observational studies today. In
an adjunct professor of Economics and Statistics at University of California,
one of The Book of Why’s many wonderful historical anec-
Berkeley. She is a director of research at Aperio Group, LLC. Her email address
dotes, the predominance of these methods is traced to the
is lrg@berkeley.edu.
work of Francis Galton, who discovered the principle of re-
Communicated by Notices Book Review Editor Stephan Ramon Garcia.
gression to the mean in an attempt to understand the pro-
For permission to reprint this article, please contact:
cess that drives heredity of human characteristics. Regres-
reprint-permission@ams.org.
sion to the mean involves association, and this led Galton
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1090/noti1912
and his disciple, Karl Pearson, to conclude that association only to my admiration for his courage and deter-
was more central to science than causation. mination. Imagine the situation in 1921. A self-
Pearl places deep learning and other modern data min- taught mathematician faces the hegemony of the
ing tools on the bottom rung of the Ladder of Causation. statistical establishment alone. They tell him
Bottom rung methods include AlphaGo, the deep learning “Your method is based on a complete misappre-
program that defeated the world’s best human Go players hension of the nature of causality in the scientific
in 2015 and 2016 [1]. For the benefit of those who remem- sense.” And he retorts, “Not so! My method is
ber the ancient times before data mining changed every- important and goes beyond anything you can gen-
thing, he explains, erate.”
The successes of deep learning have been truly re-
markable and have caught many of us by surprise. Pearl defines a causal model to be a directed acyclic graph
Nevertheless, deep learning has succeeded primar- that can be paired with data to produce quantitative causal
ily by showing that certain questions or tasks we estimates. The graph embodies the structural relationships
thought were difficult are in fact not. that a researcher assumes are driving empirical results. The
structure of the graphical model, including the identifica-
The issue is that algorithms, unlike three-year-olds, do as
tion of vertices as mediators, confounders, or colliders,
they are told, but in order to create an algorithm capable
can guide experimental design through the identification
of causal reasoning,
of minimal sets of control variables. Modern expositions
...we have to teach the computer how to selectively on graphical cause and effect models are [3] and [4].
break the rules of logic. Computers are not good
at breaking rules, a skill at which children excel.
ysis developed in [5], ultimately swayed opinion. Pearl ar- fundamentally changed our understanding of how we
gues that his methods, had they been available, might have make decisons. Pearl draws on the work of Kahneman and
resolved the issue sooner. Pearl illustrates his point in a Tversky in The Book of Why, and Pearl’s approach to analyz-
hypothetical setting where smoking causes cancer only by ing counterfactuals might be best explained in terms of a
depositing tar in lungs. The corresponding causal diagram question that Kahneman and Tversky posed in their study
is shown in Figure 3. His front door formula corrects for the [10] of how we explore alternative realities.
confounding of the unobservable smoking gene without How close did Hitler’s scientists come to develop-
ever mentioning it. The bias-corrected impact of smoking, ing the atom bomb in World War II? If they had
𝑋, on lung cancer, 𝑌, can be expressed developed it in February 1945, would the outcome
𝑃[𝑌|do(𝑋)] = ∑ 𝑃[𝑍|𝑋] ∑ 𝑃[𝑌|𝑋′ , 𝑍]𝑃[𝑋′ ]. of the war have been different?
𝑍 𝑋′ —The Simulation Heuristic
Pearl’s response to this question includes the probability of
necessity for Germany and its allies to have won World II
had they developed the atom bomb in 1945, given our his-
torical knowledge that they did not have an atomic bomb
in February 1945 and lost the war. If 𝑌 denotes Germany
winning or losing the war (0 or 1) and 𝑋 denotes Germany
having the bomb in 1945 or not having it (0 or 1), the
probability of necessity can be expressed in the language
of potential outcomes,
Figure 3. Pearl’s front door formula corrects for bias due to 𝑃 [𝑌𝑋=0 = 0 | 𝑋 = 1, 𝑌 = 1] .
latent variables in certain examples.
Dual to the probability of sufficiency, the probability of ne-
The Book of Why draws from a substantial body of aca- cessity mirrors the legal notion of “but-for” causation as
demic literature, which I explored in order to get a more in: but for its failure to build an atomic bomb by February
complete picture of Pearl’s work. From a mathematical 1945, Germany would probably have won the war. Pearl
perspective, an important application is Nicholas Chris- applies the same type of reasoning to generate transparent
takis and James Fowler’s 2007 study described in [6] ar- statements regarding climate change. Was anthropogenic
guing that obesity is contagious. The attention-grabbing global warming responsible for the 2003 heat wave in Eu-
claim was controversial because the mechanism of social rope? We’ve all heard that while global warming due to hu-
contagion is hard to pin down, and because the study was man activity tends to raise the probability of extreme heat
observational. In their paper, Christakis and Fowler up- waves, it is not possible to attribute any particular event
graded an observed association, clusters of obese individ- to this activity. According to Pearl and a team of climate
uals in a social network, to the assertion that obese indi- scientists, the response can be framed differently: There is
viduals cause their friends, and friends of their friends, to a 90% chance that the 2003 heat wave in Europe would
become obese. It is difficult to comprehend the complex not have occurred in the absence of anthropogenic global
web of assumptions, arguments, and data that comprise warming [11].
this study. It is also difficult to comprehend its nuanced This formulation of the impact of anthropogenic global
refutations by Russell Lyons [7] and by Cosma Shalizi and warming on the earth is strong and clear, but is it correct?
Andrew Thomas [8], which appeared in 2011. There is a The principle of garbage-in-garbage-out tells us that results
moment of clarity, however, in the commentary by Shal- based on a causal model are no better than its underly-
izi and Thomas, when they cite Pearl’s theorem about non- ing assumptions. These assumptions can represent a re-
identifiability in particular graphical models. Using Pearl’s searcher’s knowledge and experience. However, many
results, Shalizi and Thomas show that in the social net- scholars are concerned that model assumptions represent
work that Christakis and Fowler studied, it is impossible researcher bias, or are simply unexamined. David Freed-
to disentangle contagion, the propagation of obesity via man emphasizes this in [12], and as he wrote more re-
friendship, from the shared inclinations that led the friend- cently in [13],
ship to be formed in the first place. Assumptions behind models are rarely articulated,
The top rung of the Ladder of Causation concerns coun- let alone defended. The problem is exacerbated be-
terfactuals, which Michael Lewis brought to the attention cause journals tend to favor a mild degree of nov-
of the world with his best selling book, The Undoing Project elty in statistical procedures. Modeling, the search
[9]. Lewis tells the story of Israeli psychologists Daniel for significance, the preference for novelty, and the
Kahneman and Amos Tversky, experts in human error, who lack of interest in assumptions—these norms are
Mathematical
TEXTBOOK
Mathematical
Theory of
Scattering
Theory of Resonances
TEXTBOOKS
Scattering
Semyon Dyatlov
Maciej Zworski FROM THE AMS
Textbook
Credits
Semyon Dyatlov Figures 1–3 are by the author.
Maciej Zworski TEXTBOOKFigure 4 is courtesy of the National Transportation Safety
Board (NTSB).
Author photo is by Jim Block.
Mathematical Theory of
Scattering Resonances
Semyon Dyatlov, University of California,
Berkeley, and MIT, Cambridge, MA, and
Maciej Zworski, University of California, Berkeley