Causal Interfaces

04/18/2014

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by   David A. Eubanks, et al.

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The interaction of two binary variables, assumed to be empirical observations, has three degrees of freedom when expressed as a matrix of frequencies. Usually, the size of causal influence of one variable on the other is calculated as a single value, as increase in recovery rate for a medical treatment, for example. We examine what is lost in this simplification, and propose using two interface constants to represent positive and negative implications separately. Given certain assumptions about non-causal outcomes, the set of resulting epistemologies is a continuum. We derive a variety of particular measures and contrast them with the one-dimensional index.