Abstract

Causal inference is the study of quantifying whether a treatment, policy, or an intervention, denoted as A, has a causal effect on an outcome interest, denoted as Y. What distinguishes a causal effect of A on Y from an associative effect of A on Y, say by computing the correlation between A and Y, is that under a causal effect, intervening on the treatment A leads to changes in the outcome Y. Hence, a causal effect is a stronger notion of a relationship between A and Y than an associative effect.