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Invited Talk
Causal Learning
Bernhard Schölkopf

Sun Aug 06 04:00 PM -- 05:00 PM (PDT) @ Darling Harbour Theatre
in Invited Talk - Bernhard Schölkopf »

In machine learning, we use data to automatically find dependences in the world, with the goal of predicting future observations. Most machine learning methods build on statistics, but one can also try to go beyond this, assaying causal structures underlying statistical dependences. Can such causal knowledge help prediction in machine learning tasks? We argue that this is indeed the case, due to the fact that causal models are more robust to changes that occur in real world datasets. We discuss implications of causality for machine learning tasks, and argue that many of the hard issues benefit from the causal viewpoint. This includes domain adaptation, semi-supervised learning, transfer, life-long learning, and fairness, as well as an application to the removal of systematic errors in astronomical problems.

Author Information

Bernhard Schölkopf (MPI for Intelligent Systems Tübingen, Germany)

Bernhard Scholkopf received degrees in mathematics (London) and physics (Tubingen), and a doctorate in computer science from the Technical University Berlin. He has researched at AT&T Bell Labs, at GMD FIRST, Berlin, at the Australian National University, Canberra, and at Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK). In 2001, he was appointed scientific member of the Max Planck Society and director at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics; in 2010 he founded the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. For further information, see www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/~bs.

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