Monday, July 25, 2011

"Causal Graphical Models for Computational Social Science"

Speaker: David Jensen (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
When: Thursday July 28, 3:00-4:30pm
Where: Informatics East room 130

Abstract: Over the past 25 years, a surprising and impressive body of work has accumulated on algorithms for inferring causal dependence from observational data. This work has shown how patterns of observed statistical dependence can constrain the space of possible joint causal models, often to the point of uniquely identifying specific causal dependencies. Most of this work has been limited to very simple types of data, typically independent and identically distributed instances. Recently, my students and I have begun to extend this work to the analysis of more complex models whose causal dependencies also have spatial and temporal extent. This work draws on graphical models, social network analysis, statistical relational learning, and quasi-experimental design. I will describe some of this work, and provide an extended historical example of how it could significantly alter the practice of computational social science.

Bio: David Jensen is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Knowledge Discovery Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His current research focuses on causal discovery in relational data, computational social network analysis, fraud detection, and privacy. He serves on the Executive Committee of the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining and on the program committees of the International Conference on Machine Learning and the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He is an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. He received the 2011 Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Natural Science at UMass. From 1991 to 1995, he served as an analyst with the Office of Technology Assessment, an agency of the United States Congress. He received his doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis in 1992.
http://kdl.cs.umass.edu/people/jensen/

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