Overview of YLearn and Causal Inference

Machine learning has made great achievements in recent years. The areas in which machine learning succeeds are mainly for prediction, e.g., the classification of pictures of cats and dogs. However, machine learning is incapable of answering some questions that naturally arise in many scenarios. One example is for the counterfactual questions in policy evaluations: what would have happened if the policy had changed? Due to the fact that these counterfactuals can not be observed, machine learning models, the prediction tools, can not be used. These incapabilities of machine learning partly give rise to applications of causal inference in these days.

Causal inference directly models the outcome of interventions and formalizes the counterfactual reasoning. With the aid of machine learning, causal inference can draw causal conclusions from observational data in various manners nowadays, rather than relying on conducting craftly designed experiments.

A typical complete causal inference procedure is composed of three parts. First, it learns causal relationships using the technique called causal discovery. These relationships are then expressed either in the form of Structural Causal Models or Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG). Second, it expresses the causal estimands, which are clarified by the interested causal questions such as the average treatment effects, in terms of the observed data. This process is known as identification. Finally, once the causal estimand is identified, causal inference proceeds to focus on estimating the causal estimand from observational data. Then policy evaluation problems and counterfactual questions can also be answered.

YLearn, equipped with many techniques developed in recent literatures, is implemented to support the whole causal inference pipeline from causal discovery to causal estimand estimation with the help of machine learning. This is more promising especially when there are abundant observational data.