Causality

15 Apr 2012 17:05

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There is unfortunately no accepted name for the scientific study of causality, or of methods for inferring it. "Etiology" suggests itself, but it's already taken...

Causal inference is an important enough sub-problem to get spun out of here. (I don't feel up to updating all of my links.)

Recommended (current big picture):
• Clark Glymour
  • The Mind's Arrows: Bayes Nets and Graphical Causal Models in Psychology [Mini-review]
  • "What Went Wrong? Reflections on Science by Observation and The Bell Curve", Philosophy of Science 65 (1998): 1--32 [PDF reprint via Prof. Glymour]
• Stephen L. Morgan and Christopher Winship, Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research
• Judea Pearl
  • "Causal Inference in Statistics: An Overview", forthcoming in Statistics Surveys 3 (2009): 96--146 [PDF]
  • Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference
• Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour and Richard Scheines, Causation, Prediction and Search [Comments]

Recommended (more specialized):
• David Galles and Judea Pearl
  • "Axioms of Causal Relevance" [preprint]
  • "An Axiomatic Characterization of Causal Counterfactuals" [preprint]
  • "Testing Identifiability of Causal Effects" [preprint]
• Clark Glymour, "When Is a Brain Like the Planet?", Philosophy of Science 74 (2007): 330--347
• Dominik Janzing, "On causally asymmetric versions of Occam's Razor and their relation to thermodynamics", arxiv:0708.3411
• Kevin T. Kelly and Conor Mayo-Wilson, "Causation, Retraction, Simplicity, and Truth" [Unpublished; thanks to Kevin for a preprint]
• Maxim Raginsky, "Directed information and Pearl's causal calculus", arxiv:1110.0718
• Wesley Salmon
  • Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World
  • Causality and Explanation
• Herbert Simon
  • "Causal Ordering and Identifiability", in Studies in Econometric Method, 1953; reprinted as chapter 1 in Simon's Models of Man [PDF of the 1950 preprint version, as "The Causal Principle and the Identification Problem"]
  • "Spurious Correlation: A Causal Interpretation", Journal of the American Statistical Association 49 (1954): 467-479 [PDF reprint]
• Christopher Winship, Counterfactual Causal Analysis [Repository page with papers aimed at sociological applications]

Recommended (historical):
• Hubert M. Blalock, Causal Inferences in Nonexperimental Research [1962, so technically obsolete, but interesting to see just how many of the pieces that came together in the early 1990s were in place much earlier. One of his procedures seems to be something like a cross between an instrumental variable and propensity score matching.]
• David Hume
• ibn Rushd (= Averroes)
  • Tahafut al-Tahafut [Which, needless to say, I've only read in translation]
  • Barry Kogan, Averroes and the Metaphysics of Causation
• Jerzy Neyman, "On the Application of Probability Theory to Agricultural Experiments: Essay on Principles, Section 9", Statistical Science 5 (1990): 465--472 [Translation of a portion of Neyman's 1923 dissertation]
• Hans Reichenbach, The Direction of Time [Comments]
• Bertrand Russell
  • The Analysis of Matter
  • Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits

Modesty forbids me to recommend:
• CRS and Andrew C. Thomas, "Homophily and Contagion Are Generically Confounded in Observational Social Network Studies", arxiv:1004.4704 [Less-technical weblog version]

To read:
• Mickel Aickin, Causal Analysis in Biomedicine and Epidemiology: Based on Minimal Sufficient Causation
• P. O. Amblard and O. J. J. Michel, "On directed information theory and Granger causality graphs", arxiv:1002.1446
• Nihat Ay, "A Refinement of the Common Cause Principle", SFI Working Paper 08-01-001 [PDF]
• Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke and Harry S. Silverstein (eds.), Causation and Explanation [Blurb]
• Nancy Cartwright, Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics [blurb. Extremely harsh critiques by Pearl and Glymour ("All of her critical claims are false or at best fractionally true")]
• John Collins, Ned Hall, L.A. Paul (eds.), Causation and Counterfactuals [Forthcoming]
• Daniel Commenges, Anne Gegout-Petit, "A general dynamical statistical model with possible causal interpretation", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society B 71 (2009): 719--736, arxiv:0710.4396
• Ehtibar N. Dzhafarov, Janne V. Kujala, "Selectivity in Probabilistic Causality: Drawing Arrows from Inputs to Stochastic Outputs", arxiv:1108.3074
• Frederick Eberhardt and Richard Scheines, "Interventions and Causal Inference", phil-sci/2944
• Ellery Eells, Probabilistic Causality
• Adam Elga, "Isolation and Folk Physics", phi-sci/2678 [Ordinary notions of causality as approximations to real physics, under conditions of near-independence]
• David A. Freedman
  • "On Specifying Graphical Models for Causation," UCB Stat. Tech. Rep. 601 [abstract, pdf]
  • Statistical Models and Causal Inference: A Dialogue with the Social Sciences [blurb]
• Galavotti (ed.), Stochastic Causality
• Anne Gegout-Petit and Daniel Commenges, "A general definition of influence between stochastic processes", arxiv:0905.3619
• Clark Glymour, "Rabbit Hunting", Synthese 121 (1999): 55--78 [PDF reprint]
• Glymour and Cooper (eds.), Computation, Causation and Discovery
• Adam Glynn and Kevin Quinn, "Non-parametric Mechanisms and Causal Modeling" [PDF preprint]
• Alison Gopnik and Laura Schulz (eds.), Causal Learning: Psychology, Philosophy and Computation
• Zalán Gyenis and Miklós Rédei, "Characterizing Common Cause Closed Probability Spaces", Philosophy of Science 78 (2011): 393--409
• Joseph Y. Halpern and Judea Pearl, "Causes and Explanations: A Structural-Model Approach", "Part I: Causes", cs.AI/0011012, and "Part II: Explanations," cs.AI/0208034
• Jeffrey Haydu, "Reversals of fortune: path dependency, problem solving, and temporal cases", Theory and Society 39 (2010): 25--48
• Joe Henson, "Comparing causality principles", Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 36 (2005): 519--543
• Kevin D. Hoover, Causality in Macroeconomics
• Dominik Janzing, Xiaohai Sun and Bernhard Schölkopf, "Distinguishing Cause and Effect via Second Order Exponential Models", arxiv:0910.5561
• Stanley Lieberson, "The Big Broad Issues in Society and Social History: Application of a Probabilistic Perspective", pp. 359--385 in Vaughn R. McKim and Stephen P. Turner (eds.), Causality in Crisis? Statistical Methods and the Search for Causal Knowledge in the Social Sciences [PDF reprint]
• Vaughn R. McKim and Stephen P. Turner (ed.), Causality in Crisis? Statistical Methods and the Search for Causal Knowledge in the Social Sciences
• K. Mengersen, S. A. Moynihan, R. L. Tweedie, "Causality and Association: The Statistical and Legal Approaches", arxiv:0710.4459
• Peter Menzies, "A Structural Equations Account of Negative Causation", phil-sci/2962
• John D. Norton, "Causation as Folk Science," phil-sci/1214
• Farid Nouioua, "Why did the accident happen? A norm-based reasoning approach", cs.AI/0610015
• L. A. (Laurie) Paul
• David T. Pegg, "Causality in quantum mechanics", Physics Letters A 349 (2006): 411--414
• Huw Price and Richard Corry (eds.), Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality: Russell's Republic Revisited
• Adam Przeworski, "Is the Science of Comparative Politics Possible?" [PDF preprint. On drawing causal conclusions from natural "quasi-experiments".]
• Miklós Rédei and Stephen J. Summers, "Remarks on Causality in Relativistic Quantum Field Theory", quant-ph/0302115
• Eva Riccomagno, Jim Q. Smith
  • "Algebraic causality: Bayes nets and beyond", arxiv:0709.3377
  • "The causal manipulation of chain event graphs", 0709.3380
• Federica Russo, "Correlational data, causal hypotheses, and validity", phil-sci/8349
• Federica Russo and Jon Williamson, "Generic versus Single-case Causality: the Case of Autopsy", phil-sci/5148
• Glenn Shafer, The Art of Causal Conjecture [Bought from an on-line bookstore which gave the title as The Art of Casual Conjecture; a book which should be written. Reviwed by Glymour (PDF)]
• Ilya Shpitser, Judea Pearl, "Complete Identification Methods for the Causal Hierarchy", Journal of Machine Learning Research 9 (2008): 1941--1979 ["We consider a hierarchy of queries about causal relationships in graphical models, where each level in the hierarchy requires more detailed information than the one below. The hierarchy consists of three levels: associative relationships, derived from a joint distribution over the observable variables; cause-effect relationships, derived from distributions resulting from external interventions; and counterfactuals, derived from distributions that span multiple "parallel worlds" and resulting from simultaneous, possibly conflicting observations and interventions. We completely characterize cases where a given causal query can be computed from information lower in the hierarchy"]
• Dan Sperber, David Premack and Ann James Premack (eds.), Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate
• Patrick Suppes
  • Patrick Suppes, Scientific Philosopher
  • A Probabilistic Theory of Causality
  • Representation and Invariance
• G. A. Svechnikov, Causality and the Relation of States in Physics
• Brad Weslake, "Common Causes and The Direction of Causation", phil-sci 2383
• Phillip Wolff, "Representing Causation", phil-sci/3177
• James Woodward, Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation [Review by Glymour]

To write:
• CRS, "Causality in Models of Dynamics"