Cause and Correlation in Biology

User's Guide to Path Analysis, Structural Equations and Causal Inference

Bill Shipley

330 pages, parution le 01/08/2002

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Résumé

This book goes beyond the truism that 'correlation does not imply causation' and explores the logical and methodological relationships between correlation and causation. It presents a series of statistical methods that can test, and potentially discover, cause-effect relationships between variables in situations in which it is not possible to conduct randomised or experimentally controlled experiments. Many of these methods are quite new and most are generally unknown to biologists. In addition to describing how to conduct these statistical tests, the book also puts the methods into historical context and explains when they can and cannot justifiably be used to test or discover causal claims. Written in a conversational style that minimises technical jargon, the book is aimed at practising biologists and advanced students, and assumes only a very basic knowledge of introductory statistics.

Reviews
'... the perfect introduction to SEM. This book can be used as the primary text in a SEM course given within any discipline, and can be used by scholars and researchers from any area of science.'
Structural Equation Modeling
'Addressing students and practising biologists, Shipley does a terrific job of making mathematical ideas accessible ... Cause and Correlation in Biology is a nontechnical and honest introduction to statistical methods for testing causal hypotheses.'
Johan Paulsson, Nature Cell Biology

Contents

Preliminaries
From cause to correlation and back
Sewall Wright, path analysis and d-separation
Path analysis and maximum likelihood
Measurement error and latent variables
The structural equations model
Nested models and multilevel models
Exploration, discovery and equivalence

Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	Cambridge University Press
Auteur(s)	Bill Shipley
Parution	01/08/2002
Nb. de pages	330
Format	15,3 x 22,7
Couverture	Broché
Poids	573g
Intérieur	Noir et Blanc
EAN13	9780521529211
ISBN13	978-0-521-52921-1