Transparency challenges in policy evaluation with causal machine learning: improving usability and accountability

Causal machine learning tools are beginning to see use in real-world policy evaluation tasks to flexibly estimate treatment effects. One issue with these methods is that the machine learning models used are generally black boxes, that is, there is no globally interpretable way to understand how a model makes estimates. This is a clear problem for governments who want to evaluate policy as it is difficult to understand whether such models are functioning in ways that are fair, based on the correct interpretation of evidence and transparent enough to allow for accountability if things go wrong. However, there has been little discussion of transparency problems in the causal machine learning literature and how these might be overcome. This article explores why transparency issues are a problem for causal machine learning in public policy evaluation applications and considers ways these problems might be addressed through explainable AI tools and by simplifying models in line with interpretable AI principles. It then applies these ideas to a case study using a causal forest model to estimate conditional average treatment effects for returns on education study. It shows that existing tools for understanding black-box predictive models are not as well suited to causal machine learning and that simplifying the model to make it interpretable leads to an unacceptable increase in error (in this application). It concludes that new tools are needed to properly understand causal machine learning models and the algorithms that fit them.