What are Living Models?

What Are Living Models?

What Are Living Models? Most analytics systems describe the past. Living Models is built to reason about what happens when you change something — and why that distinction is the difference between a dashboard and a decision. In this video, Bear walks through the core argument behind Living Models: why J.C. Penney's 2012 pricing collapse wasn't a data failure but a question failure, how Judea Pearl's Ladder of Causation maps the three classes of decision-relevant questions (association, intervention, counterfactual), and what it actually takes to build a causal model that reflects the knowledge of the people closest to the system — not the analysts furthest from it. The Knowledge Acquisition Tool extracts that domain expertise through a 45-minute structured interview and feeds it into a pipeline that produces something most organizations have never seen: a ranked list of interventions evaluated by expected causal effect, compared against the cost of doing nothing.