Abstract: Aspects of the present disclosure relate to machine learning techniques for identifying the incremental impact of different past events on the likelihood that a target outcome will occur. The technology can use a recurrent neural network to analyze two different representations of an event sequence—one in which some particular event occurs, and another in which that particular event does not occur. The incremental impact of that particular event can be determined based on the calculated difference between the probabilities of the target outcome occurring after these two sequences.