Product Analytics: Applied Data Science Techniques for Actionable Consumer Insights

12. Developing Heuristics in Practice

In the last two chapters, “In Pursuit of the Experiment” we went through natural experiments and quasi-experimental designs. In this chapter, we’ll cover another quasi-experimental design technique, statistical matching. We’ll also discuss logical tools that can be used to pare down factors to A/B test. Finally, we’ll discuss Hill’s causality conditions, which we can use when all else fails and we are not able to infer causation by any other means.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• How to use statistical matching for causal inference

• Using matching as a heuristic

• Hill’s causality conditions as a guide to identify causal relationships in practice

• Best practices when it comes to inferring causation ...