arXiv Machine Learning

One Thing Leads to Another: The Essentials of Time Series Causal Discovery

The paper "One Thing Leads to Another: The Essentials of Time Series Causal Discovery" offers a unified tutorial on detecting causation between time series, tracing its origins from signal processing and outlining its evolution across statistics, dynamical systems, and machine learning. It reviews key principles, limitations, assumptions, and evaluation methods of modern discovery techniques, and highlights their growing importance in fields such as agriculture, Earth science, healthcare, and AI. A companion repository provides code packages and resources to support readers.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

Causal Discovery on Irregular Time Series

arXiv:2607. 18226v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery methods have shown strong performance in temporal systems, but they typically rely on regular and discrete lag structures, limiting their applicability to regularly sampled data.

By Martim Penim, Ricardo Ribeiro Pereira, Jacopo Bono, Hugo Ferreira, M\'ario A. T. Figueiredo, Pedro Bizarro
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 20

Causal Discovery on Irregular Time Series

Causal discovery methods have shown strong performance in temporal systems, but they typically rely on regular and discrete lag structures, limiting their applicability to regularly sampled data. However, many real-world tasks require dealing with irregularly sampled streams of events, such as sensor streams, healthcare data, and financial transactions.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

Beyond Stationarity in Time Series: Discovering Causal Structures and Latent Regimes via Markov Blankets

The paper presents RCBNB-MB, a causal discovery algorithm that relaxes the assumption of a single, time‑consistent causal structure in time series. It identifies latent causal regimes—subsets of time points where a stable causal graph holds—and iteratively segments the series to recover both regime transitions and the corresponding causal graphs using Markov blankets. The authors provide theoretical guarantees and demonstrate through simulations and real IT monitoring data that RCBNB-MB outperforms baseline methods in detecting regime changes and their causal structures.

By Lei Zan, Charles K. Assaad, Emilie Devijver, Eric Gaussier
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Robust Causal Discovery in Real-World Time Series with Power-Laws

arXiv:2507. 12257v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Exploring causal relationships in stochastic time series is a challenging yet crucial task with a vast range of applications, including finance, economics, neuroscience, and climate science.

By Matteo Tusoni, Giuseppe Masi, Andrea Coletta, Aldo Glielmo, Viviana Arrigoni, Novella Bartolini
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Root cause analysis via difference graph discovery from linear time-series data

The paper investigates root cause analysis for anomalies in linear time-series data by using difference graph discovery. It focuses on effect-defying root causes—variables whose causal coefficients differ between normal and anomalous regimes—within linear discrete-time dynamic structural causal models. The authors adapt existing difference graph methods to the time-series context, evaluate them on simulated data, and apply them to real-world IT and intensive care monitoring datasets to localize causal mechanisms behind anomalous behavior.

By Anouk Ruer, Timoth\'ee Loranchet, Daria Bystrova, Charles K. Assaad
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

From Causal Discovery to Dynamic Causal Inference in Neural Time Series

arXiv:2603. 20980v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time-varying causal models provide a powerful framework for studying dynamic scientific systems, yet most existing approaches assume that the underlying causal network is known a priori - an assumption rarely satisfied in real-world domains where causal structure is uncertain, evolving, or only indirectly observable.

By Dmitry Zaytsev, Valentina Kuskova, Michael Coppedge
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Large Causal Models for Temporal Causal Discovery

arXiv:2602. 18662v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Causal discovery for both cross-sectional and temporal data has traditionally followed a dataset-specific paradigm, where a new model is fitted for each individual dataset.

By Nikolaos Kougioulis, Nikolaos Gkorgkolis, MingXue Wang, Bora Caglayan, Dario Simionato, Andrea Tonon, Ioannis Tsamardinos
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 27

Causal-TS: A Python Library for Causal Discovery in High-Dimensional and Nonstationary Time Series

We describe Causal-TS, an open-source Python library for causal discovery in high-dimensional and nonstationary multivariate time series. Causal-TS provides four specialized algorithms-CDNOTS, CDNOTS+, CEDAR, and GRACE-along with wrappers for GES, Granger, LASSO-VAR, and LGES, all sharing a unified conditional independence (CI) test layer with GPU acceleration via PyTorch.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

Learning Causal Structure of Time Series using Best Order Score Search

The paper introduces TS‑BOSS, a time‑series extension of the Best Order Score Search (BOSS) algorithm for causal structure learning. TS‑BOSS conducts a permutation‑based search over dynamic Bayesian network structures, using grow‑shrink trees to cache intermediate score computations, thereby maintaining scalability and strong empirical performance. The authors provide theoretical guarantees of soundness under suitable assumptions and demonstrate that TS‑BOSS achieves higher adjacency recall than standard constraint‑based methods, especially in high auto‑correlation regimes.

By Irene Gema Castillo Mansilla, Urmi Ninad