Data science is science's second chance to get causal inference right: A classification of data science tasks

Understand

Causal inference from observational data is the goal of many data analyses in the health and social sciences.

• However, academic statistics has often frowned upon data analyses with a causal objective.
• The introduction of the term "data science" provides a historic opportunity to redefine data analysis in such a way that it naturally accommodates causal inference from observational data.
• Like others before, we organize the scientific contributions of data science into three classes of tasks: Description, prediction, and counterfactual prediction (which includes causal inference).