Kamal's review of spatial causal inference published

We are very proud of Kamal’s achievement, publishing his first first-authored paper in Geographical Analysis!

The paper Spatial Causality: A Systematic Review on Spatial Causal Inference reviews the state-of-the-art of Causal inference in spatial domains.

We establish that research in this direction is, indeed, only nascent. Standard approaches to Causal inference are severely challenged when it comes to spatial analysis. Spatial phenomena violate many ( actually, almost all) fundamental assumptions of causal inference, by acting at distance and by violating the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption.

We review how fundamental properties of spatial phenomena (spatial dependency, spatial heterogeneity, and spatial effects) are addressed in geographical literature, with the aim to find common methodological threads.

Yet, we find out that the methodological aparatus is still very nascent, and deserves a systeamtic treatment. This need is impacting ecological research too (no surprise, a lot of the phenomena there are spatial). A review with a similar focus has been recently (concurrently) published by Reich et al. – read it, it is excellent. We have some work cut out for us!

Reference ( a preprint will be published here soon too):

Akbari, K., Winter, S., & Tomko, M. (online first 2021). Spatial Causality: A Systematic Review on Spatial Causal Inference. Geographical Analysis. doi:10.1111/gean.12312

Causal Spatial Inference - a Review