A new approach for abnormal behavior detection was proposed using causality analysis and sparse reconstruction. To effectively represent multiple-object behavior, low level visual features and causality features were adopted. The low level visual features, which included trajectory shape descriptor, speeded up robust features and histograms of optical flow, were used to describe properties of individual behavior, and causality features obtained by causality analysis were introduced to depict the interaction information among a set of objects. In order to cope with feature noisy and uncertainty, a method for multiple-object anomaly detection was presented via a sparse reconstruction. The abnormality of the testing sample was decided by the sparse reconstruction cost from an atomically learned dictionary. Experiment results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with other state-of-the-art methods on the public databases for abnormal behavior detection.