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The Bradford Hill criteria, otherwise known as Hill's criteria for causation, are a group of minimal conditions necessary to provide adequate evidence of a causal relationship between an incidence and a consequence, established by the English epidemiologist Sir Austin Bradford Hill (18971991) in 1965. The list of the criteria is as follows:[1][2] 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Strength of association (relative risk, odds ratio) Consistency Specificity Temporal relationship (temporality) - not heuristic; factually necessary for cause to precede consequence Biological gradient (dose-response relationship) Plausibility (biological plausibility) Coherence Experiment (reversibility) Analogy (consideration of alternate explanations)
Debate over the scope of application of the criteria includes whether they can be applied to social sciences.[7] The argument proposed in this line of thought is that when considering the motives behind defining causality, the Bradford Hill criteria are important to apply to complex systems such as health sciences because they are useful in prediction models where a consequence is sought; explanation models as to why causation occurred are deduced less easily from Bradford Hill criteria as the instigation of causation, rather than the consequence, is needed for these models.
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