Unit 11 Explanatory Model Building

duck yeah

What does it mean for this to cause that? This question has flummoxed the discipline of statistics for a very long time; but, more than statistics, it has also flummoxed philosophers for even longer!

Why is something that seems so natural to us in our limited, daily lives, so difficult to formalize? If it is difficult for us to formalize in conversation, how can we hope to formalize this so that a model can discover and evluate causal effects from data?

Of all the weeks in this class, this is perhaps the most conceptually challening.