From the course: Machine Learning and AI Foundations: Prediction, Causation, and Statistical Inference
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Skepticism about causes: Is X really causing Y?
From the course: Machine Learning and AI Foundations: Prediction, Causation, and Statistical Inference
Skepticism about causes: Is X really causing Y?
- [Instructor] We've all heard the saying, "Correlation does not imply causation." We might even be reminded of it on occasion by our friends and colleagues with statistics training while we're in the middle of a report. In the context of this course, we have to remind ourselves of this because we have an explicit goal to try to establish causation. So it's worth spending a moment to see visually why one doesn't imply the other. Tyler Vigen has a website and a book where he and the rest of us get to have a bit of fun with this. Remember that the reason it's important for us is that we should always be skeptical about correlations and causes. We'll explore when we can trust this information and when we can't but his work is a lighthearted way to see just how strong a spurious correlation can be. They're so ridiculous that it's obvious that there is no underlying causation. For instance, look at this one. Math…
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