Causality Detection Methods Applied to the Investigation of Malaria Epidemics

Malaria, a disease with major health and socio-economic impacts, is driven by multiple factors, including a complex interaction with various climatic variables. In this paper, five methods developed for inferring causal relations between dynamic processes based on the information encapsulated in time series are applied on cases previously studied in literature by means of statistical methods. The causality detection techniques investigated in the paper are: a version of the kernel Granger causality, transfer entropy, recurrence plot, causal decomposition and complex networks. The methods provide coherent results giving a quite good confidence in the conclusions.