From Correlation to Causation through stories and math

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Correlation and causation are two concepts that people often mixup in their minds. I must admit that I myself have been guilty about this, and it unlikely that I would ever entirely grow out of it as it is wired deeply into our psychology. Let me use this article to briefly emphasise what the concepts of correlation and causation means, some interesting stories that have emerged from people misunderstanding these concepts and an algorithm that attempts to find causal relationship using correlation information. Here is a story that I heard a professor of mine, Prof. Dr. Ernst-Jan Camiel Wit, tell us during a lecture. There was a school that was involved in a study to see if providing free mid-day meals to students, which they could choose to be subscribed to this or not. At the end of the study, both the students who subscribed to it and did not where tested for different health indicators. It was observed that the students who chose to have meals from the programme had poorer health

The GitHub Experiment

Before deciding to move BuddyGo to Blogger, I had a crazy idea of creating a blogging scipt which enables micro-blog posts to be places anywhere on the page and could be dragged around. The posts could also be connected with each other; something like trees and nodes that one may learn in Graph Theory.



The website takes content from an XML file and display it on the website. This means that I could host my HTML, CSS and JavaScript content on GitHub and technically have the XML files exist elsewhere. The XML file could also be generated by a backend script.

Check it out at:
https://zenineasa.github.io/buddygoBlog/

Source code:
https://github.com/zenineasa/buddygoBlog

Feel free to download and play around with it. I would encourage people to ask questions about the code.

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