Books about Causality from Amazon.com

Written by one of the pre-eminent researchers in the field, this book provides a comprehensive exposition of modern analysis of causation It shows how causality has grown from a nebulous concept into a mathematical theory with significant applications in the fields of statistics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, cognitive science, and the health and social sciences. Pearl presents a unified account of the probabilistic, manipulative, counterfactual and structural approaches to causation, and devises simple mathematical tools for analyzing the relationships between causal connections, statistical associations, actions and observations. The book will open the way for including causal analysis in the standard curriculum of statistics, artifical intelligence, business, epidemiology, social science and economics. Students in these areas will find natural models, simple identification procedures, and precise mathematical definitions of causal concepts that traditional texts have tended to evade or make unduly complicated. This book will be of interest to professionals and students in a wide variety of fields. Anyone who wishes to elucidate meaningful relationships from data, predict effects of actions and policies, assess explanations of reported events, or form theories of causal understanding and causal speech will find this book stimulating and invaluable. Professor of Computer Science at the UCLA, Judea Pearl is the winner of the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Award in Computers and Cognitive Science..
Price: $30.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Time-to-event data are ubiquitous in fields such as medicine, biology, demography, sociology, economics and reliability theory. Recently, a need to analyze more complex event histories has emerged. Examples are individuals that move among several states, frailty that makes some units fail before others, internal time-dependent covariates, and the estimation of causal effects from observational data.

The aim of this book is to bridge the gap between standard textbook models and a range of models where the dynamic structure of the data manifests itself fully. The common denominator of such models is stochastic processes. The authors show how counting processes, martingales, and stochastic integrals fit very nicely with censored data. Beginning with standard analyses such as Kaplan-Meier plots and Cox regression, the presentation progresses to the additive hazard model and recurrent event data. Stochastic processes are also used as natural models for individual frailty; they allow sensible interpretations of a number of surprising artifacts seen in population data.

The stochastic process framework is naturally connected to causality. The authors show how dynamic path analyses can incorporate many modern causality ideas in a framework that takes the time aspect seriously.

To make the material accessible to the reader, a large number of practical examples, mainly from medicine, are developed in detail. Stochastic processes are introduced in an intuitive and non-technical manner. The book is aimed at investigators who use event history methods and want a better understanding of the statistical concepts. It is suitable as a textbook for graduate courses in statistics and biostatistics.

.
Price: $61.36 [Notify me when price goes down.]

As Chaos explained the science of disorder, Nexus reveals the new science of connection and the odd logic of six degrees of separation. How can geometry explain the puzzles of human behavior? In this incisive, insightful work Mark Buchanan presents the fundamental principles of the emerging field of "small worlds" theory—the idea that a hidden pattern is the key to how networks interact and exchange information, whether that network is the information highway or the firing of neurons in the brain. Mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, and social scientists are working to decipher this complex organizational system, for it may yield a blueprint of dynamic interactions within our physical as well as social worlds. Highlighting groundbreaking research behind network theory, Buchanan documents mounting support for the small-worlds idea and demonstrates its multiple applications to diverse problems—whether explaining the volatile global economy or the Human Genome Project, the spread of infectious disease or ecological damage. Nexus is an exciting introduction to the hidden geometry that weaves our lives so inextricably together. 20 illustrations..
Price: $9.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

During the last decades, there has been an explosion in computation and information technology. This development comes with an expansion of complex observational studies and clinical trials in a variety of fields such as medicine, biology, epidemiology, sociology, and economics among many others, which involve collection of large amounts of data on subjects or organisms over time. The goal of such studies can be formulated as estimation of a finite dimensional parameter of the population distribution corresponding to the observed time-dependent process. Such estimation problems arise in survival analysis, causal inference and regression analysis. This book provides a fundamental statistical framework for the analysis of complex longitudinal data. It provides the first comprehensive description of optimal estimation techniques based on time-dependent data structures subject to informative censoring and treatment assignment in so called semiparametric models. Semiparametric models are particularly attractive since they allow the presence of large unmodeled nuisance parameters. These techniques include estimation of regression parameters in the familiar (multivariate) generalized linear regression and multiplicative intensity models. They go beyond standard statistical approaches by incorporating all the observed data to allow for informative censoring, to obtain maximal efficiency, and by developing estimators of causal effects. It can be used to teach masters and Ph.D. students in biostatistics and statistics and is suitable for researchers in statistics with a strong interest in the analysis of complex longitudinal data..
Price: $74.80 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A disturbing and radical examination of the status of women and the role of violence in contemporary culture and politics .
Price: $7.24 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This book is a strikingly new exploration of the fundamentals of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory and of Newton's theory of gravitation Starting with an analysis of causality in the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction, the author discovers a series of heretofore unknown or overlooked electromagnetic interdependencies and equations. One of the most notable new results is the discovery that Maxwell's equations do not depict cause and effect relations between electromagnetic phenomena: causal dependencies in electromagnetic phenomena are found to be described by solutions of Maxwell's equations in the form of retarded electric and magnetic field integrals. A consequence of this discovery is that, contrary to the generally accepted view, time-variable electric and magnetic fields cannot cause each other and that both fields are simultaneously created by their true causative sources -- time-dependent electric charges and currents. Another similarly important discovery is that Lenz's law of electromagnetic induction is a manifestation of the previously ignored electric force produced by the time-dependent electric currents. These discoveries lead to important new methods of calculations of various electromagnetic effects in time- depended electromagnetic systems. The new methods are demonstrated by a variety of illustrative examples. Continuing his analysis of causal electromagnetic relations, the author finds that these relations are closely associated with the law of momentum conservation, and that with the help of the law of momentum conservation one can analyze causal relations not only in electromagnetic but also in gravitational systems. This leads to the discovery that in the time-dependent gravitational systems the momentum cannot be conserved without a second gravitational force field, which the author calls the "cogravitational, or Heaviside's, field." This second field, first predicted by Heaviside, relates to the gravitational field proper just as the magnetic field relates to the electric field. The author then generalizes Newton's gravitational theory to time-dependent systems and derives causal gravitational equations in the form of two retarded integrals similar to the retarded integrals for the electric and magnetic fields introduced previously. One of the most important consequences of the causal gravitational equations is that a gravitational interaction between two bodies involves not one force (as in Newton's theory) but as many as five different forces corresponding to the five terms in the two retarded gravitational and cogravitational field integrals. These forces depend not only on the masses and separation of the interacting bodies, but also on their velocity and acceleration and even on the rate of change of their masses. A series of illustrative examples on the calculation of these new forces is provided and a graphical representation of these forces is given. The book concludes with a discussion of the possibility of antigravitation as a consequence of the negative equivalent mass of the gravitational field energy. The book is written in the style and format of a textbook. The clear presentation, the detailed derivations of all the basic formulas and equations, and the many illustrative examples make this book well suitable not only for independent studies but also as a supplementary textbook in courses on electromagnetic theory and gravitation. The second edition of the book refines and improves the first edition, especially in the presentation and development of Newton's gravitational theory generalized to time-dependent gravitational systems. The book has been augmented by several new Appendixes. Particularly notable are Appendixes 5, 6, and 8. Appendixes 5 and 6 present novel "dynamic" electric and gravitational field maps of rapidly moving charges and masses. Appendix 8 contains the little-known but extremely important Heaviside's 1893 article on the generalization of Newton's gravitational theory..
Price: $22.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The anti-causal prophecies of last century have been disproved Causality is neither a ‘relic of a bygone’ nor ‘another fetish of modern science’; it still occupies a large part of the current debate in philosophy and the sciences.

This investigation into causal modelling presents the rationale of causality, i.e. the notion that guides causal reasoning in causal modelling. It is argued that causal models are regimented by a rationale of variation, nor of regularity neither invariance, thus breaking down the dominant Human paradigm. The notion of variation is shown to be embedded in the scheme of reasoning behind various causal models: e.g. Rubin’s model, contingency tables, and multilevel analysis. It is also shown to be latent – yet fundamental – in many philosophical accounts. Moreover, it has significant consequences for methodological issues: the warranty of the causal interpretation of causal models, the levels of causation, the characterisation of mechanisms, and the interpretation of probability.

This book offers a novel philosophical and methodological approach to causal reasoning in causal modelling and provides the reader with the tools to be up to date about various issues causality rises in social science.

"Dr. Federica Russo's book is a very valuable addition to a small number of relevant publications on causality and causal modelling in the social sciences viewed from a philosophical approach". (Prof. Guillaume Wunsch, Institute of Demography, University of Louvain, Belgium)

.
Price: $111.20 [Notify me when price goes down.]