ablation studies
Last modified on May 09, 2022
Ablation studies are effectively using interventions (removing parts of your system) to reveal the underlying causal structure of your system. Francois Chollet (creator of Keras) writes about this being useful in a machine learning context:
Ablation studies are crucial for deep learning research -- can't stress this enough.
— François Chollet (@fchollet) June 29, 2018
Understanding causality in your system is the most straightforward way to generate reliable knowledge (the goal of any research). And ablation is a very low-effort way to look into causality.