Beyond the Numbers – Why Causal Inference Needs More Than Statistics
Title: Causal Inference Is Not Just a Statistics ProblemAuthors & Year: McGowan, L.D., Gerke, T., and Barrett, M. (2024)Journal: Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education [DOI: 10.1080/26939169.2023. 2276446]Review Prepared by David Han Causality Is Not Obvious, Even with Good Data In Statistics 101, we learn that correlation does not imply causation. Truly understanding this is one of the trickiest challenges across all disciplines. Let’s start with a question: Does drinking coffee cause better exam performance? You might run a survey and find that students who drink more coffee tend to score higher. Great! Does this mean coffee helps you score better? Not so fast. What if more studious students are both more likely to drink coffee and more likely to study hard? In that case, it is not the coffee. It is their study habits. Or what if students drink coffee because they are stressed from cramming, and that…