Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by notslow 1987 days ago
Causal inference is only helpful is fields where an intervention is needed (like social science, medicine, etc.), which limits its applicability somewhat. Sure, ML is only correlation, but for most problems correlation is all you need.
3 comments

It's quite useful in business functions such as marketing
I think that in reality it is helpful in most situations, as you are most likely doing the analysis to decide on actions to do, which are interventions and thus assume a causal graph. It’s just that, normally, the impact of misidentifying a correlation as a cause is cheap, and corrected soon enough, so even if it is helpful, it is not essential, and it might not even justify the extra effort.
Any ML model that affect people can be analyzed from a social science point of view. Maybe causal inference could be used for model fairness/bias