AI engineering glossary · Statistics inference
What is counterfactual?
Counterfactual: What would have happened to the same unit under a different treatment than the one it actually received. It can never be observed directly, which is the core difficulty of causal questions.
Counterfactual: an example
A customer got a discount and bought; the counterfactual is whether the same customer would have bought without it.
Related terms
More Statistics inference terms
- Cramér-Rao bound
- Credible interval
- Critical value
- Degrees of freedom
- Difference-in-differences
- Effect size
- Efficiency
- Estimator
Where you learn it
Counterfactual is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.