Some of the most widely used models in economics are based on variables not yet observed, and their specification depends on future observations; the theory that underpins these delivers the backward/ forward solution. We present a newly unified construction, starting with a more general...

Abstract Compartmental model diagrams have been used for nearly a century to depict causal relationships in infectious disease epidemiology. Causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) have been used more broadly in epidemiology since the 1990s to guide analyses of a variety of public health problems....

Abstract We provide a scheme for inferring causal relations from uncontrolled statistical data based on tools from computational algebraic geometry, in particular, the computation of Groebner bases. We focus on causal structures containing just two observed variables, each of which is binary. We...

Abstract The structural interpretation of counterfactuals as formulated in Balke and Pearl (1994a,b) [ 1 , 2 ] excludes disjunctive conditionals, such as “had $X$ been $x_1~\mbox{or}~x_2$ ,” as well as disjunctive actions such as $do(X=x_1~\mbox{or}~X=x_2)$ . In contrast, the closest-world...

This paper proposes a unifying theory of forecasting in the form of a Golden Rule of Forecasting. The Golden Rule is to be conservative. A conservative forecast is consistent with cumulative knowledge about the present and the past. To be conservative, forecasters must seek all knowledge...

The present paper sets out to outline the theoretical frameworks and the research methods that may be used in addressing general issues of web behaviors and in formulating new researchable marketing questions. In view of this, we provide a brief literature review in three major areas of web...

The causal notions embodied in the concept of Granger causality have been argued to belong to a different category than those of Judea Pearl's Causal Model, and so far their relation has remained obscure. Here, we demonstrate that these concepts are in fact closely linked by showing how each...

This article describes the implementation of a double-robust estimator for pretest-posttest studies (Lunceford and Davidian, 2004, Statistics in Medicine 23: 2937-2960) and presents a new Stata command (dr) that carries out the procedure. A double-robust estimator gives the analyst two...