66,493 research outputs found
Correlation and causation between the UN Human Development Index and national and personal wealth and resource exploitation
Human development is increasingly on global policy agendas, in
particular related to the Sustainable Development Goals. Here, the UN
Human Development Index is analysed for correlation and causation
with economic and resource parameters using novel quantitative
techniques. Global datasets at national resolution are used to explore
correlation and causation with the HDI. The whole HDI is not correlated
to national totals of wealth or resource use, but is strongly correlated
to personal wealth and resource use. The multi-spatial convergence
cross mapping method is adapted to shed light on causation in this
system. It is shown that the HDI is tightly linked to the economy and
to personal resource use. Analysis of the HDI sub-indices reveals
subtleties easily overlooked. For example, it is shown that access to
water and electricity strongly influence GNI. It is shown that simple
resource accumulation/exploitation is less important in determining
HDI growth than personal wealth and access to resources. That is,
equitable distribution is more effective than gross accumulation in
influencing the HDI. Strong feedback means that investments in water
treatment and distribution networks, for example, will have strong
effects on HDI change, a conclusion that may play an important role
in national developmental policy debate
Understanding causation via correlations and linear response theory
In spite of the (correct) common-wisdom statement correlation does not imply
causation, a proper employ of time correlations and of fluctuation-response
theory allows to understand the causal relations between the variables of a
multi-dimensional linear Markov process. It is shown that the
fluctuation-response formalism can be used both to find the direct causal links
between the variables of a system and to introduce a degree of causation,
cumulative in time, whose physical interpretation is straightforward. Although
for generic non-linear dynamics there is no simple exact relationship between
correlations and response functions, the described protocol can still give a
useful proxy also in presence of weak nonlinear terms
Investigating causality in human behavior from smartphone sensor data: a quasi-experimental approach
Smartphones and wearables have become an indispensable part of our daily life. Their improved sensing and computing capabilities bring new opportunities for human behavior monitoring and analysis. Most work so far has been focused on detecting correlation rather than causation among features extracted from smartphone data. However, pure correlation analysis does not offer sufficient understanding of human behavior. Moreover, causation analysis could allow scientists to identify factors that have a causal effect on health and well-being issues, such as obesity, stress, depression and so on and suggest actions to deal with them. Finally, detecting causal relationships in this kind of observational data is challenging since, in general, subjects cannot be randomly exposed to an event.
In this article, we discuss the design, implementation and evaluation of a generic quasi-experimental framework for conducting causation studies on human behavior from smartphone data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by investigating the causal impact of several factors such as exercise, social interactions and work on stress level. Our results indicate that exercising and spending time outside home and working environment have a positive effect on participants stress level while reduced working hours only slightly impact stress
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