causal-inference-check

causal-inference-check is a skill for Claude Code from thuong-nc/perlytics-skill. It costs 35 tokens per session (1,562 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A review of whether a claim that one thing caused another is supported by the available evidence. It examines alternative explanations and whether stronger evidence, such as a controlled experiment, is needed.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess claims such as a feature increasing retention, a campaign driving sales, or a change causing a business result.
Why use it?
It prevents correlation—things changing together—from being mistaken for proof of cause and effect. This is especially important when data was observed rather than collected through a controlled test.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the perlytics-skill plugin — 16 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to assess claims such as a feature increasing retention, a campaign driving sales, or a change causing a business result.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/thuong-nc/perlytics-skill/causal-inference-check
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add thuong-nc/perlytics-skill --skill causal-inference-check
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/thuong-nc/perlytics-skill

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install perlytics-skill, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for causal-inference-check

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thuong-nc/perlytics-skill/causal-inference-check/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/thuong-nc/perlytics-skill/causal-inference-check)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thuong-nc/perlytics-skill/causal-inference-check"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thuong-nc/perlytics-skill/causal-inference-check/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for causal-inference-check

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thuong-nc/perlytics-skill/causal-inference-check"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thuong-nc/perlytics-skill/causal-inference-check.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 35 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,562 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00035 $0.01562
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00781
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00312
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00156

Measured 9d ago against content hash 93dbc018f958, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

causal-inference-check scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/causal-inference-check/SKILL.md · 118 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 118 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Causal Inference Check

Purpose

Assess whether a causal claim is justified by the available evidence, identify what alternative explanations exist, and recommend what method or evidence is needed to support the claim rigorously.

When to use

Use this skill when:

  • a team states or implies that X caused Y based on observational data ("we added feature X and retention went up")
  • a root-cause-analysis or hypothesis-tree investigation arrives at a confident-sounding conclusion that lacks experimental backing
  • a decision is being justified with a correlation rather than controlled evidence
  • you need to evaluate whether non-experimental evidence is strong enough to act on

When not to use

Do not use this skill when:

  • the causal claim is already supported by a well-designed randomized experiment (use experiment-readout instead)
  • the task is descriptive - "what happened" rather than "what caused it"

Required thinking discipline

  • Correlation is evidence, not proof. A correlation between X and Y is consistent with X causing Y, but also consistent with Y causing X, a common cause driving both, or coincidence.
  • Always name the alternative explanation before accepting a causal claim. The job is not to disprove the claim, but to surface what else could explain the pattern.
  • The counterfactual question is: what would have happened to Y if X had not occurred? If you cannot describe the counterfactual, you cannot assess the causal claim.
  • Match the method to the question rigor required. Not every question needs an RCT - but every causal claim needs a credible counterfactual.
  • Evidence constraint: Every conclusion must cite specific data — a number, a rate, a segment, or a timeframe. Do not speculate without evidential basis. If data is insufficient, state what is missing rather than asserting an unsupported inference.

Confounders to check by default

Before accepting any causal claim, ask whether these alternatives were ruled out:

  • Selection bias: did the people who received X differ systematically from those who did not, in ways that also affect Y?
  • Simultaneous change: did something else change at the same time as X that could explain the change in Y?
  • Reverse causality: could Y be causing X rather than the other way around?
  • Survivorship bias: is the comparison population systematically different because some entities dropped out?
  • Regression to the mean: was X applied to a group precisely because Y was unusually bad, making a natural rebound likely regardless of X?

Read the full file on GitHub · 118 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 118 lines · 35 tokens per session scan A 93dbc018f958

Subscribe to this mod's changes

causal-inference-check is a skill published in the GitHub repository thuong-nc/perlytics-skill (5 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 35 tokens to every session and 1,562 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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