Measures of information transfer have become a popular approach to analyze
interactions in complex systems such as the Earth or the human brain from
measured time series. Recent work has focused on causal definitions of
information transfer excluding effects of common drivers and indirect
influences. While the former clearly constitutes a spurious causality, the aim
of the present article is to develop measures quantifying different notions of
the strength of information transfer along indirect causal paths, based on
first reconstructing the multivariate causal network (\emph{Tigramite}
approach). Another class of novel measures quantifies to what extent different
intermediate processes on causal paths contribute to an interaction mechanism
to determine pathways of causal information transfer. A rigorous mathematical
framework allows for a clear information-theoretic interpretation that can also
be related to the underlying dynamics as proven for certain classes of
processes. Generally, however, estimates of information transfer remain hard to
interpret for nonlinearly intertwined complex systems. But, if experiments or
mathematical models are not available, measuring pathways of information
transfer within the causal dependency structure allows at least for an
abstraction of the dynamics. The measures are illustrated on a climatological
example to disentangle pathways of atmospheric flow over Europe.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figure
