Making Good Policies with Bad Causal Inference: The Role of Prediction and Machine Learning
In the last few decades, we have learned to be careful about causation, and have developed powerful tools for making causal inferences from data. Applying these tools has generated both policy impact and conceptual insights. Prof. Mullainathan will argue that there are a large class of problems where causal inference is largely unnecessary where, instead, prediction is the central challenge. These problems are ideally suited to machine learning and high dimensional data analysis tools. In this talk he will (1)…
