who is credited for creating a distinction between common and special cases of variation
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", also called natural patterns, are the usual, historical, quantifiable variation in a system, while "special causes" are unusual, not previously observed, non-quantifiable variation.