We argue that the health sciences make causal claims on the basis of evidence both of physical mechanisms and of probabilistic dependencies. Consequently, an analysis of causality solely in terms of physical mechanisms, or solely in terms of probabilistic relationships, does not do justice to the causal claims of these sciences. Yet there seems to be a single relation of cause in these sciences...

A serious defect with the Halpern-Pearl (HP) definition of causality is repaired by combining a theory of causality with a theory of defaults. In addition, it is shown that (despite a claim to the contrary) a cause according to the HP condition need not be a single conjunct. A definition of causality motivated by Wright’s NESS test is shown to always hold for a single conjunct. Moreover, condit...

It is often useful in multivariate time series analysis to determine statistical causal relations between different time series. Granger causality is a fundamental measure for this purpose. Yet the traditional pairwise approach to Granger causality analysis may not clearly distinguish between direct causal influences from one time series to another and indirect ones acting through a third time ...

Identifying causal relations among simultaneously acquired signals is an important problem in multivariate time series analysis. For linear stochastic systems Granger proposed a simple procedure called the Granger causality to detect such relations. In this work we consider nonlinear extensions of Granger’s idea and refer to the result as Extended Granger Causality. A simple approach implementi...

We analyze the computational complexity of causal relationships in Pearl’s structural models, where we focus on causality between variables, event causality, and probabilistic causality. In particular, we analyze the complexity of the sophisticated notions of weak and actual causality by Halpern and Pearl. In the course of this, we also prove an open conjecture by Halpern and Pearl, and establi...

The concept of causality is changing as human knowledge changes. Causality as an abstract notion has been traditionally studied in the field of metaphysics in philosophy. The Greek philosophers understood the time causality as explanation in general (Aristotle, 350 B.C.). The search for causes was a search for "first principles", which were meant to be explanatory. In the more recent philosophy...

The happened before model has been widely used to model distributed computations In particular it has been used to model the logical time and the potential causality aspects of a distributed computation Though it is a good model for logical time we argue that it is not a good model for potential causality We introduce a better model for potential causality that extends happened before to allow ...

The causal notions embodied in the concept of Granger causality have been argued to belong to a different category than those of Judea Pearl’s Causal Model, and so far their relation has remained obscure. Here, we demonstrate that these concepts are in fact closely linked by showing how each relates to straightforward notions of direct causality embodied in settable systems, an extension and re...