Causal Discovery from Conditionally Stationary Time Series Show others and affiliations
2025 (English) In: Proceedings of Machine Learning Research - International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2025, ML Research Press , 2025, Vol. 267, p. 2715-2741Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Causal discovery, i.e., inferring underlying causal relationships from observational data, is highly challenging for AI systems. In a time series modeling context, traditional causal discovery methods mainly consider constrained scenarios with fully observed variables and/or data from stationary time-series. We develop a causal discovery approach to handle a wide class of nonstationary time series that are conditionally stationary, where the nonstationary behaviour is modeled as stationarity conditioned on a set of latent state variables. Named State-Dependent Causal Inference (SDCI), our approach is able to recover the underlying causal dependencies, with provable identifiablity for the state-dependent causal structures. Empirical experiments on nonlinear particle interaction data and gene regulatory networks demonstrate SDCI’s superior performance over baseline causal discovery methods. Improved results over non-causal RNNs on modeling NBA player movements demonstrate the potential of our method and motivate the use of causality-driven methods for forecasting.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages ML Research Press , 2025. Vol. 267, p. 2715-2741
National Category
Probability Theory and Statistics
Identifiers URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-385512 Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105023641342 OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-385512 DiVA, id: diva2:2086567
Conference 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2025, Vancouver, Canada, Jul 13 2025 - Jul 19 2025
Note QC 20260715
2026-07-152026-07-152026-07-15 Bibliographically approved