NlinTS: An R Package For Causality Detection in Time Series

The causality is an important concept that is widely studied in the literature, and has several applications, especially when modelling dependencies within complex data, such as multivariate time series. In this article, we present a theoretical description of methods from the NlinTS package, and we focus on causality measures. The package contains the classical Granger causality test. To handle non-linear time series, we propose an extension of this test using an artificial neural network. The package includes an implementation of the Transfer entropy, which is also considered as a non linear causality measure based on information theory. For discrete variables, we use the classical Shannon Transfer entropy, while for continuous variables, we adopt the k-nearest neighbors approach to estimate it.

Youssef Hmamouche
2020-09-10

Supplementary materials

Supplementary materials are available in addition to this article. It can be downloaded at RJ-2020-016.zip

CRAN packages used

NlinTS, vars, lmtest, RTransferEntropy, timeSeries, Rcpp

CRAN Task Views implied by cited packages

TimeSeries, Finance, Econometrics, HighPerformanceComputing, MissingData, NumericalMathematics, SocialSciences

Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Hmamouche, "NlinTS: An R Package For Causality Detection in Time Series", The R Journal, 2020

BibTeX citation

@article{RJ-2020-016,
  author = {Hmamouche, Youssef},
  title = {NlinTS: An R Package For Causality Detection in Time Series},
  journal = {The R Journal},
  year = {2020},
  note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2020-016},
  doi = {10.32614/RJ-2020-016},
  volume = {12},
  issue = {1},
  issn = {2073-4859},
  pages = {21-31}
}