# An Interventional Perspective on Identifiability in Gaussian LTI Systems with Independent Component Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18048 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18048/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.01332/) (2015)
- [Variational Autoencoders and Nonlinear ICA: A Unifying Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04809/) (2019)
- [Underspecification Presents Challenges for Credibility in Modern Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03395/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Learning with Data Augmentations Provably Isolates Content from Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04619/) (2021)
- [Nonlinear ICA Using Auxiliary Variables and Generalized Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08651/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Feature Extraction by Time-Contrastive Learning and Nonlinear ICA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06336/) (2016)
- [Contrastive Learning Inverts the Data Generating Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08850/) (2021)
- [Disentanglement via Mechanism Sparsity Regularization: A New Principle for Nonlinear ICA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10098/) (2021)
- [On the Sample Complexity of the Linear Quadratic Regulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01688/) (2017)
- [Learning Without Mixing: Towards A Sharp Analysis of Linear System Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08334/) (2018)
- [Weakly supervised causal representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16437/) (2022)
- [CITRIS: Causal Identifiability from Temporal Intervened Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03169/) (2022)
- [Towards Nonlinear Disentanglement in Natural Data with Temporal Sparse Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10930/) (2020)
- [Nonparametric Identifiability of Causal Representations from Unknown Interventions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00542/) (2023)
- [ICE-BeeM: Identifiable Conditional Energy-Based Deep Models Based on Nonlinear ICA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11537/) (2020)
- [Learning Temporally Causal Latent Processes from General Temporal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05428/) (2021)
- [Independent mechanism analysis, a new concept?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05200/) (2021)
- [Learning Linear Causal Representations from Interventions under General Nonlinear Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02235/) (2023)
- [Near optimal finite time identification of arbitrary linear dynamical systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01251/) (2018)
- [The Incomplete Rosetta Stone Problem: Identifiability Results for Multi-View Nonlinear ICA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06642/) (2019)
- [Identifiability Guarantees for Causal Disentanglement from Soft Interventions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06250/) (2023)
- [Gradient Descent Learns Linear Dynamical Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05191/) (2016)
- [Non-asymptotic Identification of LTI Systems from a Single Trajectory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05722/) (2018)
- [Hidden Markov Nonlinear ICA: Unsupervised Learning from Nonstationary Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12107/) (2020)
- [Weakly Supervised Representation Learning with Sparse Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01101/) (2022)
- [Disentangling Identifiable Features from Noisy Data with Structured Nonlinear ICA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09620/) (2021)
- [Temporally Disentangled Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13647/) (2022)
- [Learning Linear Dynamical Systems with Semi-Parametric Least Squares](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00768/) (2019)
- [Causal Discovery with General Non-Linear Relationships Using Non-Linear ICA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09096/) (2019)
- [Identifiability of latent-variable and structural-equation models: from linear to nonlinear](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02672/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [On the Origins of Linear Representations in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03867/) (2024)
- [InfoNCE: Identifying the Gap Between Theory and Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00143/) (2024)
- [Learning Interpretable Concepts: Unifying Causal Representation Learning and Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09236/) (2024)
- [Marrying Causal Representation Learning with Dynamical Systems for Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13888/) (2024)
- [Identifiable Exchangeable Mechanisms for Causal Structure and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14302/) (2024)
- [Position: An Empirically Grounded Identifiability Theory Will Accelerate Self-Supervised Learning Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13101/) (2025)
- [Towards Identifiability of Interventional Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15987/) (2025)
- [Estimating Treatment Effects with Independent Component Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16467/) (2025)
- [Limits of Learning Linear Dynamics from Experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12010/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We investigate the relationship between system identification and intervention design in dynamical systems. While previous research demonstrated how identifiable representation learning methods, such as Independent Component Analysis (ICA), can reveal cause-effect relationships, it relied on a passive perspective without considering how to collect data. Our work shows that in Gaussian Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) systems, the system parameters can be identified by introducing diverse intervention signals in a multi-environment setting. By harnessing appropriate diversity assumptions motivated by the ICA literature, our findings connect experiment design and representational identifiability in dynamical systems. We corroborate our findings on synthetic and (simulated) physical data. Additionally, we show that Hidden Markov Models, in general, and (Gaussian) LTI systems, in particular, fulfil a generalization of the Causal de Finetti theorem with continuous parameters.