Solved problems and remaining challenges for Granger causality analysis in neuroscience: A response to Stokes and Purdon (2017)

Abstract

Granger-Geweke causality (GGC) is a powerful and popular method for identifying directed functional (`causal') connectivity in neuroscience. In a recent paper, Stokes and Purdon [1] raise several concerns about its use. They make two primary claims: (1) that GGC estimates may be severely biased or of high variance, and (2) that GGC fails to reveal the full structural/causal mechanisms of a system. However, these claims rest, respectively, on an incomplete evaluation of the literature, and a misconception about what GGC can be said to measure. Here we explain how existing approaches (as implemented, for example, in our popular MVGC software [2,3]) resolve the first issue, and discuss the frequently-misunderstood distinction between functional and effective neural connectivity which underlies Stokes and Purdon's second claim. [1] Patrick A. Stokes and Patrick. L. Purdon (2017), A study of problems encountered in Granger causality analysis from a neuroscience perspective, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 114(34):7063-7072. [2] Lionel Barnett and Anil K. Seth (2012), The MVGC Multivariate Granger Causality Matlab toolbox, http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~lionelb/MVGC/ [3] Lionel Barnett and Anil K. Seth (2014), The MVGC multivariate Granger causality toolbox: A new approach to Granger-causal inference, J. Neurosci. Methods 223:50-68