# Behaviour Modelling of Social Animals via Causal Structure Discovery and Graph Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14333 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14333/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Detecting causal associations in large nonlinear time series datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07007/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Causal Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02770/) (2020)
- [The Causal-Neural Connection: Expressiveness, Learnability, and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00793/) (2021)
- [Causal Inference for Time series Analysis: Problems, Methods and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05829/) (2021)
- [Relating Graph Neural Networks to Structural Causal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04173/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Trust Region Reward Optimization and Proximal Inverse Reward Optimization Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23135/) (2025)
- [Causal Structure Discovery for Error Diagnostics of Children's ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00402/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Better understanding the natural world is a crucial task with a wide range of applications. In environments with close proximity between humans and animals, such as zoos, it is essential to better understand the causes behind animal behaviour and what interventions are responsible for changes in their behaviours. This can help to predict unusual behaviours, mitigate detrimental effects and increase the well-being of animals. There has been work on modelling the dynamics behind swarms of birds and insects but the complex social behaviours of mammalian groups remain less explored. In this work, we propose a method to build behavioural models using causal structure discovery and graph neural networks for time series. We apply this method to a mob of meerkats in a zoo environment and study its ability to predict future actions and model the behaviour distribution at an individual-level and at a group level. We show that our method can match and outperform standard deep learning architectures and generate more realistic data, while using fewer parameters and providing increased interpretability.