Causal Bandits Podcast

Send us Fan Mail *How do you forecast an event that has never happened before?* How do you forecast an event that has never happened before? The recent closure and reopening of the Strait of Hormuz are unique events. For events like these, traditional risk models lose their statistical basis: repetition. Alexander Denev returns to the podcast to show how causal models (Bayesian networks) let us re...

Send us Fan Mail Causality, Experimentation, and Marketplaces Meet Lawrence de Geest (Zoox, ex-Lyft, ex-NBA), a former soccer player and an ex-NBA data scientist, who fell in love with marketplaces, despite the fact he hated math. In the episode we ponder how to deal with causality when our interventions change the dynamics of the environment we intervene upon, what to do with SUTVA violations, an...

Send us Fan Mail Do Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Exist? For the last 50 years, we've designed cars to be safe... For the 50th-percentile male. Well, that's actually not 100% correct. According to Stanford's report, we introduced "female" crash test dummies in the 1960s, but... They were just scaled-down versions of male dummies and... Represented the 5th percentile of f...

Send us Fan Mail *What can we learn about causal inference from the “war” between Bayesians and frequentists?* What can we learn about causal inference from the “war” between Bayesians and frequentists? In the episode, we cover: - What can we learn from the “war” between Bayesians and frequentists? - Why do Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) “just work”? - Do heterogeneous treatment effects...

Send us Fan Mail The Causal Gap: Truly Responsible AI Needs to Understand the Consequences Why do LLMs systematically drive themselves to extinction, and what does it have to do with evolution, moral reasoning, and causality? In this brand-new episode of Causal Bandits, we meet Zhijing Jin (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Toronto) to answer these questions and look into...

Send us Fan Mail Create Your Causal Inference Roadmap. Causal Inference, TMLE & Sensitivity If you're into causal inference and machine learning you probably heard about double machine learning (DML). DML is one of the most popular frameworks leveraging machine learning algorithms for causal inference, while offering good statistical properties. Yet... There's another framework that...

Send us Fan Mail *Causal Inference From Human Behavior, Reproducibility Crisis & The Power of Causal Graphs* Is Jonathan Heidt right that social media causes the mental health crisis in young people? If so, how can we be sure? Can other disciplines learn something from the reproducibility crisis in Psychology, and what is multiverse analysis? Join us for a conversation on causal inference from...

Send us Fan Mail *Agents, Causal AI & The Future of DoWhy* The idea of agentic systems taking over more complex human tasks is compelling. New "production-grade" frameworks to build agentic systems pop up, suggesting that we're close to achieving full automation of these challenging multi-step tasks. But is the underlying agentic technology itself ready for production? And if no...

Send us Fan Mail  📽️ FREE Online Course on Causality   📕 Causal Inference & Discovery in Python Causal Secrets of N=1 Experiments Join me for a one of a kind conversation on the opportunities and challenges of n-of-1 trials, Eric's causal journey, his path into statistics, his love of sci-fi, and how single-subject experiments could reshape personalized medicine. Video version available...

Send us Fan Mail From Quantum Causal Models to Causal AI at Spotify Ciarán loved Lego. Fascinated by the endless possibilities offered by the blocks, he once asked his parents what he could do as an adult to keep building with them. The answer: engineering. As he delved deeper into engineering, Ciarán noticed that its rules relied on a deeper structure. This realization inspired him to pursue quan...

Send us Fan Mail Stefan Feuerriegel is the Head of the Institute of AI in Management at LMU. His team consistently publishes work on causal machine learning at top AI conferences, including NeurIPS, ICML, and more. At the same time, they help businesses implement causal methods in practice. They worked on projects with companies like ABB Hitachi, and Booking.com. Stefan believes his team thrives b...

Send us Fan Mail Causal Bandits at cAI 2024 (The Royal Society, London) The cAI Conference in London slammed the door on baseless claims that causality cannot be used in industrial practice. In the episode of Causal Bandits Extra we interview participants and speakers at Causal AI Conference London, who share their main insights from the event, and the challenges they face in applying causal metho...

Send us Fan Mail Which models work best for causal discovery and double machine learning? In this extra episode, we present 4 more conversations with the researchers presenting their work at the CLeaR 2024 conference in Los Angeles, California. What you'll learn: - Which causal discovery models perform best with their default hyperparameters? - How to tune your double machine learning model?...

Send us Fan Mail Root cause analysis, model explanations, causal discovery. Are we facing a missing benchmark problem? Or not anymore? In this special episode, we travel to Los Angeles to talk with researchers at the forefront of causal research, exploring their projects, key insights, and the challenges they face in their work. Time codes: 0:15 - 02:40    Kevin Debeire 2:41 - 06:37    Yuchen Zhu...

Send us Fan Mail  *Causal Bandits at AAAI 2024 || Part 2* In this special episode we interview researchers who presented their work at AAAI 2024 in Vancouver, Canada. Time codes:  00:12 - 04:18 Kevin Xia (Columbia University) - Transportability 4:19 - 9:53 Patrick Altmeyer (Delft) - Explainability & black-box models 9:54 - 12:24 Lokesh Nagalapatti (IIT Bombay) - Continuous treatment effects 12...

Send us Fan Mail  Causal Bandits at AAAI 2024 || Part 1 In this special episode we interview researchers who presented their work at AAAI 2024 in Vancouver, Canada and participants of our workshop on causality and large language models (LLMs) Time codes: 00:00 Intro 00:20 Osman Ali Mian (CISPA) - Adaptive causal discovery for time series 04:35 Emily McMilin (Independent/Meta) - LLMs, causality &am...

Send us Fan Mail Meet The Godfather of Modern Causal Inference His work has pretty literally changed the course of my life and I am honored and incredibly grateful we could meet for this great conversation in his home in Los Angeles To anybody who knows something about modern causal inference, he needs no introduction. He loves history, philosophy and music, and I believe it's fair to say tha...

Send us Fan Mail Can we say something about YOUR personal treatment effect? The estimation of individual treatment effects is the Holy Grail of personalized medicine. It's also extremely difficult. Yet, Scott is not discouraged from studying this topic. In fact, he quit a pretty successful business to study it. In a series of papers, Scott describes how combining experimental and observationa...

Send us Fan Mail Video version of this episode is available here Causal personalization? Dima did not love computers enough to forget about his passion for understanding people. His work at Booking.com focuses on recommender systems and personalization, and their intersection with AB testing, constrained optimization and causal inference. Dima's passion for building things started early in hi...

Send us Fan Mail Was Deep Learning Revolution Bad For Causal Inference? Did deep learning revolution slowed down the progress in causal research? Can causality help in finding drug repurposing candidates? What are the main challenges in using causal inference at scale? Ehud Karavani, the author of the CausalLib Python library and Researcher at IBM Research shares his experiences and thoughts on th...

Send us Fan Mail   Causal AI: The Melting Pot. Can Physics, Math & Biology Help Us? What is the relationship between physics and causal models? What can science of non-human animal behavior teach causal AI researchers? Bernhard Schölkopf's rich background and experience allow him to combine perspectives from computation, physics, mathematics, biology, theory of evolution, psychology and e...

Send us Fan Mail   What makes two tech giants collaborate on an open source causal AI package? Emre's adventure with causal inference and causal AI has started before it was trendy. He's one of the original core developers of DoWhy - one of the most popular and powerful Python libraries for causal inference - and a researcher focused on the intersection of causal inference, causal discov...

Send us Fan Mail Recorded on Jan 17, 2024 in London, UK. Video version available here What makes so many predictions about the future of AI wrong? And what's possible with the current paradigm? From medical imaging to song recommendations, the association-based paradigm of learning can be helpful, but is not sufficient to answer our most interesting questions. Meet Athanasios (Thanos) Vlontzo...

Send us Fan Mail Video version available here Are markets efficient, and if not, can causal models help us leverage the inefficiencies? Do we really need to understand what we're modeling? What's the role of symmetry in modeling financial markets? What are the main challenges in applying causal models in finance? Ready to dive in? About The Guest Alexander Denev is the CEO of Turnleaf An...

Send us Fan Mail Love Causal Bandits Podcast? Help us bring more quality content: Support the show Video version of this episode is available here Causal Inference with LLMs and Reinforcement Learning Agents? Do LLMs have a world model? Can they reason causally? What's the connection between LLMs, reinforcement learning, and causality? Andrew Lampinen, PhD (Google DeepMind) shares the insight...