First, Nature doesn’t pick causal models randomly. In fact, cancellations are quite useful (homeostasis, and gene regulation are often “implemented” by faithfulness violations).
The very subject of my paper. I don’t think the magnitude of the obstacle has yet been fully appreciated by people who are trying to extend methods of causal discovery in that direction. And in the folklore, there are frequent statements like this one, which is simply false:
“Empirically observed covariation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for causality.”
I think the way causal discovery is sold sometimes is not as a way of establishing causal structure from data, but as a way of narrowing down the set of experiments one would have to run to establish causal structure definitively, in domains which are poorly understood but in which we can experiment (comp. bio., etc).
If phrased in this way, assuming faithfulness is not “so bad.” It is true that many folks in causal inference and related areas are quite skeptical of faithfulness type assumptions and rightly so. To me, it’s the lack of uniform consistency that’s the real killer.
The very subject of my paper. I don’t think the magnitude of the obstacle has yet been fully appreciated by people who are trying to extend methods of causal discovery in that direction. And in the folklore, there are frequent statements like this one, which is simply false:
(Edward Tufte, quoted here.)
I think the way causal discovery is sold sometimes is not as a way of establishing causal structure from data, but as a way of narrowing down the set of experiments one would have to run to establish causal structure definitively, in domains which are poorly understood but in which we can experiment (comp. bio., etc).
If phrased in this way, assuming faithfulness is not “so bad.” It is true that many folks in causal inference and related areas are quite skeptical of faithfulness type assumptions and rightly so. To me, it’s the lack of uniform consistency that’s the real killer.
In Part II of this talk (http://videolectures.net/uai2011_shpitser_causal/) I gave is an example of how you can do completely ridiculous, magical things if you assume a type of faithfulness. See 31:07.