Mehrdad Jafari Mamaghani: Causality in Cell Migration

Cell migration is a significant phenomenon that plays a major role in development,physiology and disease. Our focal interest is on the role of cell migration in metastasis. We address this interest using a platform of Systems Microscopy: systems biology analysis of living cells using a coalition of automated microscopy, image quantification, data mining and statistical analysis. Cell migration data acquired by our Systems Microscopy platform offers a wide array of possibilities in terms of statistical analysis. Hitherto, our focus has been dominantly dedicated to exploratory analysis and frameworks of unsupervised learning. Recently, however, we have begun exploring possibilities on modeling causal relationships between cellular and molecular features on one end, and cellular migratory behavior on the other end.

In this talk, by using the concept of Granger (non)-causality via vector auto-regression, and relaxing a few assumptions of parametricity, we resent a framework where one can move beyond correlations and introduce causal directions.