⏺➡️⏺ Edge#200: PyWhy is Microsoft’s New Home for Causal Inference

The new organization is hosting DoWhy, the popular causal inference framework

On Thursdays, we dive deep into one of the freshest research papers or technology frameworks that is worth your attention. Our goal is to keep you up to date with new developments in AI to complement the concepts we debate in other editions of our newsletter.

💥 What’s New in AI: PyWhy is Microsoft’s New Home for Causal Inference

Causal inference is one of the most important and yet often ignored areas of machine intelligence. Championed by several AI legends like Turing Award winner Judea Pearl, causal inference focuses on understanding the effect of counterfactuals on a specific output. Pearl outlined some of the principles of causal inference in his masterpiece The Book of Why, published a few years ago. Inspired by that work, Microsoft Research open-sourced a project called DoWhy in 2018. Last week, Microsoft announced the next iteration of its commitment to causal inference research and technology by creating PyWhy, an open-source GitHub organization that would be the home of several projects like DoWhy. Even more important is the fact that Microsoft partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to actively contribute to these projects.

DoWhy

The simplest way to think about DoWhy is