Contrast set mining has been extensively studied to detect changes between several contrasted databases. Previous studies mainly compared the supports of an itemset and extracted the itemsets with significantly different supports across those databases. Differently, we contrast the correlations of an itemset between two contrasted databases and attempt to detect potential changes. Any highly co...

Let me begin by saying how much I enjoyed Professor Michael Moore’s thick, rich, and learned book. I learned a great deal from reading it, and recommend it to anyone with an interest in any of the three topics it covers: moral responsibility, legal liability, and the metaphysics of causation. It covers such a wide breadth of terrain that even the most expert readers will learn a great deal from...

Lewis ([1973a]) famously defined event c to be causally relevant to event e in world w just in case O c ð Þ and O e ð Þ as well as :O c ð Þ !:O e ð Þ are true in w, where O c ð Þ and O e ð Þ say that c occurs and that e occurs, respectively. For him, this implied that O c ð Þ ! O e ð Þ is true, because he was assuming the underlying logic to be VC, which validates ^ ð Þ ! ð Þ. If one works with...

This paper addresses the level of publishing productivity of faculty for the years 1991 through 1993 at institutions with membership in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). The sources of data are the three citations indexes produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. Both raw and normalized data are presented. In addition, these measures are compared with some library-related...

When is a cause of a cause of an effect also a cause of that effect? The right answer is either “Sometimes” or “Always”. In favour of “Always”, transitivity is considered by some to be necessary for distinguishing causes from redundant noncausal events. Moreover transitivity may be motivated by an interest in an unselective notion of causation, untroubled by principles of invidious discriminati...

For nearly a century, investigators in the social sciences have used regression models to deduce cause-and-effect relationships from patterns of association. Path models and automated search procedures are more recent developments. In my view, this enterprise has not been successful. The models tend to neglect the difficulties in establishing causal relations, and the mathematical complexities ...

Recognition of causality is important to achieve natural language discourse understanding. Previous approaches rely on shallow linguistic features. In this work, we propose to identify causality in verbnoun pairs by exploiting deeper semantics of nouns and verbs. Particularly, we acquire and employ three novel types of knowledge: (1) semantic classes of nouns with a high and low tendency to enc...

What conception of causation is at work in the law? I argue that the law implicitly relies on a contrastive conception. In a liability case where the defendant’s breach of duty must be shown to have caused the plaintiff’s damages, it is not enough to consider what would have happened if the cause had not occurred—the law instructs us to look to a specific replacement for the cause, which in thi...

Our ordinary causal concept seems to fit poorly with how our best physics describes the world. We think of causation as a time-asymmetric dependence relation between relatively local events. Yet fundamental physics describes the world in terms of dynamical laws that are, possible small exceptions aside, time symmetric and that relate global time slices. My goal in this paper is to show why we a...