Wrapping it up

In this chapter, we discussed three broad sources of causal knowledge: scientific insights, personal experiences and domain knowledge, and causal structure learning.

We saw that humans start to work on building world models very early in development; yet not all world models that we build are accurate. Heuristics that we use introduce biases that can skew our models on an individual, organizational, or cultural level.

Scientific experiments are an attempt to structure the process of obtaining knowledge so that we can exclude or minimize unwanted interferences and sources of distortion.

Unfortunately, experiments are not always available and have their own limitations. Causal structure learning methods can be cheaper and faster than running experiments, but they might rely on assumptions difficult to meet in certain scenarios.

Hybrid methods that combine causal structure learning, domain expertise, and efficient experimentation are a new exciting field of...