Clark N. Glymour (born 1942) is the Alumni University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also a senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.

Work

Glymour earned undergraduate degrees in chemistry and philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He did graduate work in chemical physics and obtained a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University Bloomington in 1969. Glymour is the founder of the Philosophy Department at Carnegie Mellon University, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, a Phi Beta Kappa lecturer, and is a Fellow of the statistics section of the AAAS. Glymour and his collaborators created the causal interpretation of Bayes nets. His areas of interest include epistemology (particularly Android epistemology), machine learning, automated reasoning, psychology of judgment, and mathematical psychology. One of Glymour's main contributions to the philosophy of science is in the area of Bayesian probability, particularly in his analysis of the Bayesian "problem of old evidence". Glymour, in collaboration with Peter Spirtes and Richard Scheines, also developed an automated causal inference algorithm implemented as software named TETRAD. Using multivariate statistical data as input, TETRAD rapidly searches from among all possible causal relationship models and returns the most plausible causal models based on conditional dependence relationships between those variables. The algorithm is based on principles from statistics, graph theory, philosophy of science, and artificial intelligence. An algorithm used in learning the structure of Bayesian networks, the PC algorithm, is named after the inventors' first names, Peter Spirtes and Clark Glymour.

Publications

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Journal articles