This letter comments on the report “Forensic Science in Criminal Courts: Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature-comparison Methods” released in September 2016, by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The report advocates a two-stage procedure for evaluation...

We present an overview of the decision-theoretic framework of statistical causality, which is well suited for formulating and solving problems of determining the effects of applied causes. The approach is described in detail, and it is related to and contrasted with other current formulations,...

Abstract We develop a mathematical and interpretative foundation for the enterprise of decision-theoretic (DT) statistical causality, which is a straightforward way of representing and addressing causal questions. DT reframes causal inference as “assisted decision-making” and aims to...

Abstract I thank Ilya Shpitser for his comments on my article, and discuss the use of models with restricted interventions.

Abstract I thank Judea Pearl for his discussion of my paper and respond to the points he raises. In particular, his attachment to unaugmented directed acyclic graphs has led to a misapprehension of my own proposals. I also discuss the possibilities for developing a non-manipulative understanding...

We display pseudo-likelihood as a special case of a general estimation technique based on proper scoring rules. Such a rule supplies an unbiased estimating equation for any statistical model, and this can be extended to allow for missing data. When the scoring rule has a simple local structure,...