Sufficient-component causes are discussed within the deterministic potential out-comes framework so as to formalize notions of sufficient causes, synergism and sufficient cause interactions. Doing so allows for the derivation of counterfactual and empirical conditions for detecting the presence of sufficient cause interactions. The conditions are novel in that, unlike other conditions in the literature, they make no assumptions about monotonicity. The conditions can also be generalized and the conditions for three-way sufficient cause interactions are given explicitly. The statistical tests derived for sufficient cause interactions are compared with and contrasted to interaction terms in standard statistical models.
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VanderWeele et al. (2008) studied this question.
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