[info] Connectionists: Causality challenge

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Isabelle Guyon <isabelle at clopinet.com> -----

From: Isabelle Guyon <isabelle at clopinet.com>
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:48:12 -0800
To: connectionists at cs.cmu.edu
Subject: Connectionists: Causality challenge
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=================   A challenge on causality has started...

==========   CAUSATION AND PREDICTION

Deadline April 30, 2008

=======================================================
    http://www.causality.inf.ethz.ch/challenge.php
=======================================================

This challenge bridges the gap between data mining/machine learning and 
causal discovery. Several datasets drawn from real data, or emulating real 
data, are provided, with the goal of making predictions under 
"manipulations".

The setting is very similar to a usual machine learning setting: We have a 
training set and a test set; a target variable, whose values are concealed 
in test data, must be predicted. But, the test data are not distributed like 
the training data: some variables in test data are "manipulated" by an 
external agent, i.e. set to given values instead of being drawn from the 
"natural" distribution. 
Such problems are encountered in many application domains: In medicine to 
predict the effect of a new treatment, in economy or ecology to predict the 
consequences of new issued policies, in marketing to predict customer 
response to marketing campaigns.

Feature selection researchers should be particularly interested in that 
challenge. The problems posed by the challenge require finding subsets of 
predictive variables, taking into account whether such variables remain 
predictive when manipulations are performed. We anticipate that this should 
require the knowledge of causal relationships between variables since acting 
on causes of the target may result in a response change while acting on 
consequences should not. However, we encourage participants to enter the 
challenge with other approaches to the problem.

=======================================================
This challenge is part of the EC Pascal challenge and the WCCI 2008 
competition programs and is funded by the NSF Grant N0 ECCS-0725746. The 
results of the challenge will be discussed at a WCCI workshop (June 2008) 
and the proceedings will be published in JMLR. Several prizes will be 
awarded to top ranking participants.


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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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