A new Granger causality measure for eliminating the confounding influence of latent common inputs

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new Granger causality measure which is robust against the confounding influence of latent common inputs. This measure is inspired by partial Granger causality in the literature, and its variant. Using numerical experiments we first show that the test statistics for detecting directed interactions between time series approximately obey the $F$-distributions when there are no interactions. Then, we propose a practical procedure for inferring directed interactions, which is based on the idea of multiple statistical test in situations where the confounding influence of latent common inputs may exist. The results of numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method successfully eliminates the influence of latent common inputs while the normal Granger causality method detects spurious interactions due to the influence of the confounder.