No More "What" Without the "Why"

Throughout the last months, I had the chance to enable various organizations and leaders leveraging their large databases with machine learning. I was particularly engaging with member organisations which struggle with rising dropout rates (churns) -- an issue that became even more serious throughout the pandemic when individual income has been on a declining and the fear of job loss on a rising path. With machine learning, we used very large membership databases with individual-level information (e.g. Machine Learning tells us the "What", Causal Inference the "Why" Despite the overall good performance of the machine learning models, our clients were always interested in one obvious question: Why does an individual member leave? Unfortunately, machine learning models are not suited to identify the causes of things but rather they are built to predict things.