arXiv AI

Beyond Sufficiency: Time Series Explanation with Counterfactual Necessity

arXiv:2607. 21573v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Faithful explanations of time-series classifiers should identify subsequences that are not only sufficient to preserve a black-box model's prediction, but also necessary for maintaining it.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

TimeSAE: Causal Sparse Decoding for Faithful Explanations of Black-Box Time Series Models

arXiv:2601. 09776v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As black box models and pretrained models gain traction in time series applications, understanding and explaining their predictions becomes increasingly vital, especially in high-stakes domains where interpretability and trust are essential.

By Khalid Oublal, Quentin Bouniot, Qi Gan, Stephan Cl\'emen\c{c}on, Zeynep Akata
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
Aug 27

NVExplain: Explaining Time Series Forecasting with Latent Trajectory Analysis and Structure-Preserving Surrogates

NVExplain is a model‑agnostic framework that explains time‑series forecasting by attributing each forecast horizon to temporally relevant historical lags. It models forecasting as a latent trajectory, introduces semantic flow to track information evolution, and aggregates this into a lag‑horizon attribution matrix. The method also generates structure‑preserving perturbations and fits sparse local surrogates to produce human‑readable, temporally coherent explanations, and demonstrates competitive faithfulness and stability across benchmark datasets.

By Muyan Anna Li, Manikandan Ravikiran, Aditi Gautam
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

DoTime: A Synthetic Benchmark Generator for Interventional and Counterfactual Time Series

arXiv:2607. 27263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most benchmarks for causal inference over time series are observational, small, or domain-specific, leaving interventional and counterfactual estimation under-served exactly where it matters most, such as in healthcare, policy evaluation, and climate science.

By Dennis Thumm, Billy Tim Anthony, Ying Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 23

TimeLitmus: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Cross-Modal Understanding and Explanation Faithfulness in Event-Conditioned Time-Series Prediction

arXiv:2609.24677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to make predictions from numerical time-series histories and textual events. Yet accuracy alone cann...

By Jie Gong, Maowei Jiang, Zhiwei Liu, Yankai Chen, Guojun Xiong, Xue Liu, Min Peng, Qianqian Xie, Sophia Ananiadou