Extra – is there causality beyond DAGs?
In this extra section, we’ll give a brief overview of some non-DAG-based approaches to causality. This is definitely an incomplete and somehow subjective guide.
Dynamical systems
The scenario with two interacting partners that we discussed in the previous section describes a dynamical system. This particular example is inspired by the research by an American ex-rabbi turned psychologist called John Gottman, who studies human romantic relationships from a dynamical systems point of view (for an overview: Gottman & Notarius, 2000; Gottman et al., 1999).
Dynamical systems are often described using differential equations and cannot be solved analytically (for a toy example of differential equations applied to romantic relationships, check Strogatz, 1988).
Dynamical systems have been extensively studied in physics (Strogatz, 2018), biology (Cosentino & Bates, 2011), and psychology (Nowak & Vallacher, 1998), among...
