A Brief Introduction to Temporality and Causality

Abstract: Causality is a non-obvious concept that is often considered to be related to temporality. In this paper we present a number of past and present approaches to the definition of temporality and causality from philosophical, physical, and computational points of view. We note that time is an important ingredient in many relationships and phenomena. The topic is then divided into the two main areas of temporal discovery, which is concerned with finding relations that are stretched over time, and causal discovery, where a claim is made as to the causal influence of certain events on others. We present a number of computational tools used for attempting to automatically discover temporal and causal relations in data.