Causal Discovery from Temporal Data: An Overview and New Perspectives
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Abstract (arXiv)
Temporal data, representing chronological observations of complex systems, has always been a typical data structure that can be widely generated by many domains, such as industry, medicine and finance. Analyzing this type of data is extremely valuable for various applications. Thus, different temporal data analysis tasks, eg, classification, clustering and prediction, have been proposed in the past decades. Among them, causal discovery, learning the causal relations from temporal data, is considered an interesting yet critical task and has attracted much research attention. Existing causal discovery works can be divided into two highly correlated categories according to whether the temporal data is calibrated, ie, multivariate time series causal discovery, and event sequence causal discovery. However, most previous surveys are only focused on the time series causal discovery and ignore the second category. In this paper, we specify the correlation between the two categories and provide a systematical overview of existing solutions. Furthermore, we provide public datasets, evaluation metrics and new perspectives for temporal data causal discovery.
Key facts. Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 114 of its 404 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2023.
Builds on
114 of 404 references.
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50 most cited of 114 All 114 (JSON)
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- 2026seq2cause: One Autoregressive Backbone, Four Causal Discovery Tasks in Event Sequences25 Sep 2026
- 2026ITSY: Causal Discovery From Irregular Time-Series Data20 Sep 2026
- 2026One Intervention per Component is Enough: Towards Identifiability in Linear Stochastic Dynamics from Steady State17 Sep 2026
- 2026When Correlations Mislead: Confounder-Aware Multi-View Urban Region Representation Learning14 Sep 2026
- 2026Beyond Stationarity in Time Series: Discovering Causal Structures and Latent Regimes via Markov Blankets4 Sep 2026
- 2026Resilient Concurrent Causal Discovery for Topological Event Sequences22 Aug 2026
- 2026GRACE: Gated Refinement for Accurate Causal Edge Discovery in High-Dimensional Time Series22 Jun 2026
- 2026Vector Space of Cycles6 Jun 2026
- 2026LMT: A Bayesian Framework for Causal Discovery from Textual Alarm Records in Manufacturing Systems3 Jun 2026
- 2026Learning Temporal Causal Structure via Smooth Differentiable Optimization2 Jun 2026
- 2026Forget Less, Generalize More: Unifying Temporal and Structural Adaptation for Dynamic Graphs28 May 2026
- 2026MOSAIC: Module Discovery via Sparse Additive Identifiable Causal Learning for Scientific Time Series6 May 2026
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