In the study of complex physical and biological systems represented by
multivariate stochastic processes, an issue of great relevance is the
description of the system dynamics spanning multiple temporal scales. While
methods to assess the dynamic complexity of individual processes at different
time scales are well-established, multiscale analysis of directed interactions
has never been formalized theoretically, and empirical evaluations are
complicated by practical issues such as filtering and downsampling. Here we
extend the very popular measure of Granger causality (GC), a prominent tool for
assessing directed lagged interactions between joint processes, to quantify
information transfer across multiple time scales. We show that the multiscale
processing of a vector autoregressive (AR) process introduces a moving average
(MA) component, and describe how to represent the resulting ARMA process using
state space (SS) models and to combine the SS model parameters for computing
exact GC values at arbitrarily large time scales. We exploit the theoretical
formulation to identify peculiar features of multiscale GC in basic AR
processes, and demonstrate with numerical simulations the much larger
estimation accuracy of the SS approach compared with pure AR modeling of
filtered and downsampled data. The improved computational reliability is
exploited to disclose meaningful multiscale patterns of information transfer
between global temperature and carbon dioxide concentration time series, both
in paleoclimate and in recent years