On Inductive Learning of Causal Knowledge for Problem Solving

Causal learning is an inductive process and causal knowledge about the world is of paramount importance for intelligent systems, natural or artificial. Given an observation of events happening in the world, how does an intelligent system establish the causalities between them? The issue is further complicated by intervening noisy events. Psychologists have proposed a contingency model of causal induction but it does not incorporate computational means of addressing the issues of intervening noise to recover the causalities between events. In this paper we propose an inductive causal learning method that is able to establish causalities between events in the presence of intervening noisy events, and we apply the method to real-world data to investigate its viability. We demonstrate that the learning method works well in uncovering valid causalities, and relatively non-noisy, opportunistic situations provide the best confirmation of the causalities involved. Causal knowledge is the foundation of problem solving and the ability to learn causal knowledge enables the intelligent system to be maximally adaptive.