UCPH Statistics Seminar: Junhyung Park

Title: Causal Spaces: A measure-theoretic axiomatisation of causality

Speaker: Junhyung Park from the MPI in Tübingen

Abstract: We view causality both as an extension of probability theory and as a study of what happens when one intervenes on a system, and argue in favour of taking Kolmogorov's measure-theoretic axiomatisation of probability as the starting point towards an axiomatisation of causality. To that end, we propose the notion of a causal space, consisting of a probability space along with a collection of transition probability kernels, called causal kernels, that encode the causal information of the space. Our proposed framework is not only rigorously grounded in measure theory, but it also sheds light on long-standing limitations of existing frameworks including, for example, cycles, latent variables and stochastic processes.

About: Jun recently received his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, under the supervision of Krikamol Muandet and Bernhard Schölkopf. He will join ETH Zürich in October as a postdoctoral researcher. Previously, he obtained his MSc in Statistics at ETH Zürich under the guidance of Sara van de Geer, and before that, he received his BA and MMath (Part III) degrees at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in the foundational questions of causality, as well as statistical learning theory.