I didn't read the whole article since I didn't want to sign up, but in general: maybe. Machine learning models are really good at things like prediction, but i

I didn't read the whole article since I didn't want to sign up, but in general: maybe. Machine learning models are really good at things like prediction, but if it's valuable to do inference about the phenomenon (e.g., is there evidence that X is positively associated with the odds of Y, given Z,Q,R), careful study design and appropriate statistical models are a better choice. These come with theoretical underpinnings - whether that's the coverage guarantees of frequentist methods or the decision-theoretic foundations of Bayesian inference. I'm not sure whether or not that means this choice was good on the part of BlackRock, however.