Attribution
Attribution is the association of content, contributions, decisions, or outcomes with their sources, creators, or causes.
Machine Learning Platform Engineering
Source attribution is the association of generated or retrieved information with the documents or sources that support it.
- How it is used
- Supports trustworthy RAG answers by exposing retrieved evidence for display, fact-checking, and debugging.
- How deep it goes
- Details structured metadata, document formatting, streaming events, and observability, but does not specify a citation-ranking method.
- Examples
- Uses numbered retrieved documents, structured source dictionaries, and streamed source events in a documentation assistant.
- What you can do after
- Build RAG interfaces that display supporting documents, retrieval statistics, streamed evidence, and graceful failure states.
Read how Machine Learning Platform Engineering explains attribution →
Causal AI
Attribution is the assignment of a causal source and corresponding credit or blame for an outcome.
- How it is used
- Answers why a particular customer behavior, business outcome, or system failure happened.
- How deep it goes
- Combines counterfactual reasoning, necessary and sufficient causes, abnormality, and causal-strength measures; it stops short of deriving those measures.
- Examples
- Uses advertisements and clicks, missing recommendations and churn, and a faulty server accessed before a network crash.
- What you can do after
- Diagnose root causes and allocate credit or blame using counterfactual and causal reasoning.
Related concepts
- cause analysisalternative to · Cause analysis is a systematic investigation of the underlying factors that produced a problem, failure, incident, or other outcome.
- logaddressed by · A log is a record of events, activity, or diagnostic information produced during the operation of a system or process, often ordered by time.
- structural causal modeladdressed by · A structural causal model represents causal relationships among variables through equations that determine each variable from other variables and exogenous factors.
These guides are generated from the text of Manning books by Manning's knowledge graph and link to the sections they draw on. The full books are available on liveBook and at manning.com.