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Re:Cause And Effect: A New Statistical Test That Can Tease T... by gwern on Saturday December 20, 2014 @05:23PM (#8778159)
> This isn't as generally useful as the title suggests...

My understanding is that the more general case of causal discovery, where you have lots of variables, is already somewhat solved by Pearlian techniques (if you have A/B/C you can conditionalize on each and see what graph fits best - all independent, C confounding A & B, A -> B -> C, etc). But these techniques break down when it's just A and B: A->B and B->A look symmetrical - the problem is so simple that it's hard, because there's no C which can help break the symmetry and suggest something about the underlying causal graph.

OP is interesting because it points out that even without a C, A and B often aren't symmetrical in one particular way. So now pairs can be attacked as well as triplets and bigger; and maybe it points the way to new ways to tackle more complicated datasets.

Re:Cause And Effect: A New Statistical Test That Can Tease T... by cafebeen on Saturday December 20, 2014 @05:52PM (#8778244)
Certainly interesting--wish the article mentioned the Pearlian techniques. My issue is with the overstated claims, e.g.

"Statisticians have always thought it impossible to tell cause and effect apart using observational data. Not any more."

Maybe including "bivariate" in the paper's title could have helped.