BEING a practicing biologist, I feel that I cannot attempt the kind of analysis of cause and effect in biological phenomena that a logician would undertake. I would instead like to concentrate on the special difficulties presented by the classical concept of causality in biology. From the first attempts to achieve a unitary concept of cause, the student of causality has been bedeviled by these ...

f d f h l s R esearch examining the relationship between major depressive disorder (MDD) and hippocampal volume has long wrestled with the chicken and egg question. From the time the rst report was published finding smaller hippocampal volumes in atients with MDD compared with healthy control subjects (1), here have been hundreds of studies in the literature, with the ajority, but not all, find...

One of the major tasks in maintaining software systems is understanding how specific effects came to be. This is especially true for effects that cause major harm, and especially challenging for causes that actively prevent discovery. We introduce Malfor, a system that, for any reliably reproducible and observable effect, isolates the processes that cause the effect. We apply Malfor to intrusio...

Disturbances in chemical processes spreading through plants affect a number of process variables. The operator or the monitoring scheme in place often detects the disturbance at a variable critical to the process. This variable might not be close to the actual cause and isolation of the root cause becomes therefore a task for the control engineer. The aim of this study is to find ways of identi...

Aging is a universal, lifelong and inevitable phenomenon, the product of an interaction between genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors. The biological changes that occur during the aging process affect virtually all components of living systems, from the molecular up to that of the whole organism. These changes lead to a breakdown in the normal homoeostatic mechanisms, and so the function...

Recent developments in structural equation modeling have produced several methods that can usually distinguish cause from effect in the two-variable case. For that purpose, however, one has to impose substantial structural constraints or smoothness assumptions on the functional causal models. In this paper, we consider the problem of determining the causal direction from a related but different...

Reductionism assumes that causation in the physical world occurs at the micro level, excluding the emergence of macro-level causation. We challenge this reductionist assumption by demonstrating that, once causal power is properly defined and measured, it is possible for a macro level to “beat” the micro level. Here, this was done through a principled, well-defined measure of intrinsic cause-eff...

A growing body of empirical work has documented the superior performance characteristics of exporting plants and firms relative to non-exporters. Employment, shipments, wages, productivity and capital intensity are all higher at exporters at any given moment. This paper asks whether good firms become exporters or whether exporting improves firm performance. The evidence is quite clear on one po...

Mechanical ventilation (MV) is used clinically to maintain gas exchange in patients that require assistance in maintaining adequate alveolar ventilation. Common indications for MV include respiratory failure, heart failure, drug overdose, and surgery. Although MV can be a life-saving intervention for patients suffering from respiratory failure, prolonged MV can promote diaphragmatic atrophy and...

We consider the problem of function estimation in the case where the data distribution may shift between training and test time, and additional information about it may be available at test time. This relates to popular scenarios such as covariate shift, concept drift, transfer learning and semisupervised learning. This working paper discusses how these tasks could be tackled depending on the k...