Common Cause And Special Cause (statistics)
Common and special causes are the two distinct origins of variation in a process, as defined in the statistical thinking and methods of Walter A. Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming. Briefly, "common causes" are the usual, historical, quantifiable variation in a system, while "special causes" are unusual, not previously observed, non-quantifiable variation.
The distinction is fundamental in philosophy of statistics and philosophy of probability, with different treatment of these issues being a classic issue of probability interpretations, being recognised and discussed as early as 1703 by Gottfried Leibniz; various alternative names have been used over the years.
The distinction has been particularly important in the thinking of economists Frank Knight, John Maynard Keynes and G. L. S. Shackle.
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