Causal data science: Answering the crucial 'why' in your analysis. by Subhasish Misra #ODSC_India
Channel: ConfEngine
Date: 2019-08-24

Causal questions are ubiquitous in data science. For e.g. questions such as, did changing a feature in a website lead to more traffic or if digital ad exposure led to incremental purchase are deeply rooted in causality.

Randomized tests are considered to be the gold standard when it comes to getting to causal effects. However, experiments in many cases are unfeasible or unethical. In such cases one has to rely on observational (non-experimental) data to derive causal insights. The crucial difference between randomized experiments and observational data is that in the former, test subjects (e.g. customers) are randomly assigned a treatment (e.g. digital advertisement exposure). This helps curb the possibility that user response (e.g. clicking on a link in the ad and purchasing the product) across the two groups of treated and non-treated subjects is different owing to pre-existing differences in user characteristic (e.g. demographics, geo-location etc.). In essence, we can then attribute divergences observed post-treatment in key outcomes (e.g. purchase rate), as the causal impact of the treatment.

This treatment assignment mechanism that makes causal attribution possible via randomization is absent though when using observational data. Thankfully, there are scientific (statistical and beyond) techniques available to ensure that we are able to circumvent this shortcoming and get to causal reads.

The aim of this talk, will be to offer a practical overview of the above aspects of causal inference -which in turn as a discipline lies at the fascinating confluence of statistics, philosophy, computer science, psychology, economics, and medicine, among others. Topics include:
- The fundamental tenets of causality and measuring causal effects.
- Challenges involved in measuring causal effects in real world situations.
- Distinguishing between randomized and observational approaches to measuring the same.
- Provide an introduction to measuring causal effects using observational data using matching and its extension of propensity score based matching with a focus on a) the intuition and statistics behind it b) Tips from the trenches, basis the speakers experience in these techniques and c) Practical limitations of such approaches
- Walk through an example of how matching was applied to get to causal insights regarding effectiveness of a digital product for a major retailer.

Finally conclude with why understanding having a nuanced understanding of causality is all the more important in the big data era we are into.

More details: https://confengine.com/odsc-india-2019/proposal/9788

Conference Link: https://india.odsc.com