Direction of Causation Models

A Theory of Inferred Causation

This paper concerns the empirical basis of causation, and addresses the following issues: 1. the clues that might prompt people to perceive causal relationships in uncontrolled observations. 2. the task of inferring causal models from these clues, and 3. whether the models inferred tell us anything useful about the causal mechanisms that underly the observations. We propose a minimal-model sema...

The inheritance of alcohol sensitivity and of patterns of alcohol use.

Compared to controls, sons of alcoholics have been reported to exhibit decreased sensitivity to a challenge dose of alcohol (e.g. a smaller increase in body-sway: Schuckit, 1985). We reanalyze alcohol challenge data from a general population sample of Australian twin pairs (Martin et al., 1985a, b). By fitting direction-of-causation models, we show that in males differences in body-sway are lar...

Inferring the direction of causation in cross-sectional twin data: theoretical and empirical considerations.

A recent multivariate extension of the classical twin study in theory allows the inference of the direction of causation between correlated traits solely using cross-sectional data. In this paper we briefly review this model and assess its usefulness by applying it to a number of pairs of biological and psychological variables between which the nature of the causative relationship is already kn...

Genetic Epidemiology 11:463-472 (1994) Direction of Causation: Reply to Commentaries

We reply to the commentaries on the lead papers by Neale et al. [1994a] and Duffy and Martin [1994]. Topics covered include power calculations, cross-sectional measurement vs. lifetime reports, the appropriateness of the direction of causation (DOC) model, extensions to study causation between the latent variables, sampling of subjects, and heterogeneity. We consider the potential of combining ...

The Direction of Causation : Ramsey ’ s Ultimate Contingency