Structure Learning in Human Causal Induction

Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Thomas L. Griffiths

Abstract: We use graphical models to explore the question of how people learn sim(cid:173) ple causal relationships from data. The two leading psychological theo(cid:173) ries can both be seen as estimating the parameters of a fixed graph. We argue that a complete account of causal induction should also consider how people learn the underlying causal graph structure, and we propose to model this inductive process as a Bayesian inference. Our argument is supported through the discussion of three data sets.