Causality Challenge #1: Causation and Prediction Challenge

The focus of this challenge is on predicting the results of actions performed by an external agent. Examples of that problem are found, for instance, in the medical domain, where one needs to predict the effect of a drug prior to administering it, or in econometrics, where one needs to predict the effect of a new policy prior to issuing it. We focus on a given target variable to be predicted (e.g. health status of a patient) from a number of candidate predictive variables (e.g. risk factors in the medical domain). Under the actions of an external agent, variable predictive power and causality are tied together. For instance, both smoking and coughing may be predictive of lung cancer (the target) in the absence of external intervention; however, prohibiting smoking (a possible cause) may prevent lung cancer, but administering a cough medicine to stop coughing (a possible consequence) would not.