You're reading from Causal Inference and Discovery in Python

Product type Book

Published in May 2023

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781804612989

Pages 456 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

Concepts

Data Science

Author (1):

Aleksander Molak

Table of Contents (21) Chapters

Preface

1. Part 1: Causality – an Introduction

2. Chapter 1: Causality – Hey, We Have Machine Learning, So Why Even Bother?

3. Chapter 2: Judea Pearl and the Ladder of Causation

4. Chapter 3: Regression, Observations, and Interventions

5. Chapter 4: Graphical Models

6. Chapter 5: Forks, Chains, and Immoralities

7. Part 2: Causal Inference

8. Chapter 6: Nodes, Edges, and Statistical (In)dependence

9. Chapter 7: The Four-Step Process of Causal Inference

10. Chapter 8: Causal Models – Assumptions and Challenges

11. Chapter 9: Causal Inference and Machine Learning – from Matching to Meta-Learners

12. Chapter 10: Causal Inference and Machine Learning – Advanced Estimators, Experiments, Evaluations, and More

13. Chapter 11: Causal Inference and Machine Learning – Deep Learning, NLP, and Beyond

14. Part 3: Causal Discovery

15. Chapter 12: Can I Have a Causal Graph, Please?

16. Chapter 13: Causal Discovery and Machine Learning – from Assumptions to Applications

17. Chapter 14: Causal Discovery and Machine Learning – Advanced Deep Learning and Beyond

18. Chapter 15: Epilogue

19. Index

20. Other Books You May Enjoy

Causal discovery – real-world applications, challenges, and open problems

Before we wrap up this chapter, let’s take a broader perspective and discuss the applicability of causal discovery to real-world problems and challenges that may arise along the way.

In the previous chapter, we mentioned that Alexander Reisach and colleagues have demonstrated that the synthetic data used to evaluate causal discovery methods might contain unintended regularities that can be relatively easily exploited by these models (Reisach et al., 2021). The problem is that these regularities might not be present in real-world data.

Another challenge is that real-world data with a known causal structure is scarce. This makes synthetic datasets a natural benchmarking choice, yet this choice leaves us without a clear understanding of what to expect of causal structure learning algorithms when applied to real-world datasets.

The lack of reliable benchmarks is one of the main challenges in...