Towards Realistic Models of Change: A Causal Perspective on Decision-Making and Dynamical Systems

Isacco Beretta

While statistical learning has made remarkable progress in recent decades, driven by large datasets and data-driven protocols that have transformed scientific practice, it still faces a key limitation: it struggles to generalize beyond the data it has seen, often failing under distribution shift. Causality offers a promising solution: causal models focus on the underlying mechanisms of change rather than surface-level associations, enabling robust reasoning under external interventions. This allows systems not only to learn from data, but also to reason about hypothetical scenarios, adapt to new environments, and inform better decisions. This thesis explores how these approaches can inform each other, in two parts. The first part examines algorithmic recourse, that is, identifying which changes an individual can make to overturn an unfavorable decision. We propose an alternative perspective to the established framework, arguing for a more realistic cost function, a reformulation of the problem in causal terms, and the inclusion of a temporal dimension in policy evaluation. The second part focuses on dynamical systems, extending the notions of causal interventions and effects to…