The Programme That Seemed to Make People Worse: Graphical Models and Causal Inference

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 1h

A fictional hospital's post-discharge phone programme appears to raise readmissions by 50 percent, and a readmission model agrees. Consultant geriatrician Dr Femi Adeyemi asks analyst Clara Nyström one question: how did patients get onto the programme? Part sixteen of The Deep End's Machine Learning series goes from Bayesian networks and hidden Markov models to Pearl's do-calculus, Simpson's paradox and the natural experiments economists won a Nobel for, and shows how to estimate what an action does when nobody ran a trial. Cross-references: ep15, ep122 (control), ep205, ep217, parts 4, 5, 7…