#interventional-data News & Analysis

Do Real-World Datasets Contain Natural Experiments? An Empirical Study Using Causal Feature Selection

Researchers investigate whether real-world datasets contain natural experiments—events that create implicit interventions affecting some groups but not others—and propose using causal discovery methods to detect and leverage them for improved model performance. Their empirical study across synthetic and real-world datasets suggests that natural experiments do exist in practice and can enhance downstream machine learning outcomes when treated as interventional rather than observational data.