Dr. Dominik Janzing

Dominik Janzing is a Principal Research Scientist at Amazon Research Tübingen, Germany, where he works on causal inference for monitoring AWS cloud services.

Education / degrees:
– 1995: “Diplom” in Physics, Universität Tübingen
– 1998: Dr. in Mathematics, Universität Tübingen
– 2006: “Habilitation” (teaching permission) in Computer Science, Universität Karlsruhe (now KIT)

Research topics:
– 1995 – 2006: quantum information and thermodynamics
– Since 2003: causal inference – foundations and applications

His contributions range from the formalization of the independence of mechanisms principle to the formalization of root cause analysis, quantification of causal influence, and evaluation of causal discovery methods without ground truth. The textbook Elements of Causal Inference received the ”Causality in Statistics Education Award” from the American Statistical Association.

Selected publications:
1) Janzing, Wocjan, Zeier, Geiss, Beth: Thermodynamic cost of reliability and low temperatures, tightening Landauer’s principle and the second law, Int. J. Physics, 2000.
2) Janzing and Schölkopf: Causal inference using the algorithmic Markov condition, IEEE TIT 2010.
3) Janzing, Grosse-Wentrupp, Balduzzi, Schölkopf: Quantifying causal influences, Annals of Statistics 2013
4) Peters, Janzing, Schölkopf: Elements of Causal Inference, MIT Press 2017.
5) Budhathoki, Minorics, Blöbaum, Janzing: causal structure-based root cause analysis of outliers, ICML 2022.
6) Faller, Vankadara, Mastakouri, Locatello, Janzing: Self-compatibility: evaluating causal discovery without ground truth, AISTATS 2024.