Tetrad 4.3

The aim of the program is to provide sophisticated methods in a friendly interface requiring very little statistical sophistication of the user and no programming knowledge. It is not intended to replace flexible statistical programming systems such as Matlab, Splus or R. TETRAD is freeware that performs many of the functions in commercial programs such as Netica, Hugin, LISREL, EQS and other programs, and many discovery functions these commercial programs do not perform. TETRAD is unique in the suite of principled search ("exploration," "discovery") algorithms it provides--for example its ability to search when there may be unobserved confounders of measured variables, to search for models of latent structure, and to search for linear feedback models--and in the ability to calculate predictions of the effects of interventions or experiments based on a model. All of its search procedures are "pointwise consistent"--they are guaranteed to converge almost certainly to correct information about the true structure in the large sample limit, provided that structure and the sample data satisfy various commonly made (but not always true!) assumptions.