Automatic Identification of Quasi-Experimental Designs for Scientific Discovery

Contents

We briefly describe recent research on the automatic identification of quasi-experimental designs, a family of methods used in the medical, social, and economic sciences to discover causal knowledge from observational data. These methods are widely used for manual discovery, but recent advances in knowledge representation and databases have made it possible to automate aspects of their use. We report on a prototype system for automatically identifying quasiexperimental designs and suggest future work.