Clark Glymour

Glymour has for four decades been a pioneer in the design of statistical computer algorithms that can aid researchers searching for causal hypothesis that can account for statistical data. The problem is a simple one of combinatorial explosion: given only six possible causally relevant factors, there are 3,781,503 distinct Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), each of which represents a different possible set of causal relations among the six. Researchers cannot possibly check each of these one-by-one, so computer-assisted search techniques are essential for scientific research.