Causal Inference and Social Networks: How to Quantify the Effects of our Peers
“If all of your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?” While this comeback may be just an annoying retort to many teenagers, it presents an interesting question – what is the effect of social influence? This is what Ogburn, Sofrygin, Diaz, and van der Laan explore in their paper, “Causal Inference for Social Network Data”. More specifically, they are interested in developing methods to estimate causal effects in social networks and applying this to data from the Framingham Heart Study.
Pinpointing Causality across Time and Geography: Uncovering the Relationship between Airstrikes and Insurgent Violence in Iraq
“Correlation is not causation”, as the saying goes, yet sometimes it can be, if certain assumptions are met. Describing those assumptions and developing methods to estimate causal effects, not just correlations, is the central concern of the causal inference field. Broadly speaking, causal inference seeks to measure the effect of a treatment on an outcome. This treatment can be an actual medicine or something more abstract like a policy. Much of the literature in this space focuses on relatively simple treatments/outcomes and uses data which doesn’t exhibit much dependency. As an example, clinicians often want to measure the effect of a binary treatment (received the drug or not) on a binary outcome (developed the disease or not). The data used to answer such questions is typically patient-level data where the patients are assumed to be independent from each other. To be clear, these simple setups are enormously useful and describe commonplace causal questions.
Determining the best way to route drivers for ridesharing via reinforcement learning
Companies often want to test the impact of one design decision over another, for example Google might want to compare the current ranking of search results (version A) with an alternative ranking (version B) and evaluate how the modification would affect users’ decisions and click behavior. An experiment to determine this impact on users is known as an A/B test, and many methods have been designed to measure the ‘treatment’ effect of the proposed change. However, these classical methods typically assume that changing one person’s treatment will not affect others (known as the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption or SUTVA). In the Google example, this is typically a valid assumption—showing one user different search results shouldn’t impact another user’s click behavior. But in some situations, SUTVA is violated, and new methods must be introduced to properly measure the effect of design changes.