The Brexit vote: A case study in causal inference using machine learning

In this blog post, we'll answer the question, "How did the Brexit vote impact exchange rates between the British Pound and US Dollar?" To do so, we'll use causal inference techniques to estimate the impact of what statisticians call a "treatment," in this case a policy decision. Please note that this is a technical blog post aimed at educating about concepts and tools with public data, not any political or economic implications. The techniques we'll discuss here can apply to all kinds of scenarios, such as the impact of a marketing campaign or product introduction on sales. Causal inference is needed because we don't have a controlled experiment for this scenario. An ideal experiment contains carefully matched groups, except for the explanatory variable being investigated.