# CaPulse: Detecting Anomalies by Tuning in to the Causal Rhythms of Time Series

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04630 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04630/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Normalizing Flows for Probabilistic Modeling and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02762/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoregressive Flow for Density Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07057/) (2017)
- [Detecting Spacecraft Anomalies Using LSTMs and Nonparametric Dynamic Thresholding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04431/) (2018)
- [Anomaly Transformer: Time Series Anomaly Detection with Association Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02642/) (2021)
- [CFLOW-AD: Real-Time Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Localization via Conditional Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12571/) (2021)
- [Deep Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02694/) (2019)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)
- [Same Same But DifferNet: Semi-Supervised Defect Detection with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12577/) (2020)
- [Adversarially Learned One-Class Classifier for Novelty Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09088/) (2018)
- [Time-Series Anomaly Detection Service at Microsoft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03821/) (2019)
- [Multivariate Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting via Conditioned Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06103/) (2020)
- [Causality Inspired Representation Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14237/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for Time Series Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05244/) (2022)
- [DROCC: Deep Robust One-Class Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12718/) (2020)
- [Causal Inference-Based Root Cause Analysis for Online Service Systems with Intervention Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05871/) (2022)
- [Deciphering Spatio-Temporal Graph Forecasting: A Causal Lens and Treatment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13378/) (2023)
- [AnomalyBERT: Self-Supervised Transformer for Time Series Anomaly Detection using Data Degradation Scheme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04468/) (2023)
- [Detecting Multivariate Time Series Anomalies with Zero Known Label](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02108/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Outlier Detection using Memory and Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12642/) (2021)
- [Towards Out-of-Distribution Sequential Event Prediction: A Causal Treatment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13005/) (2022)
- [A Causal Approach to Detecting Multivariate Time-series Anomalies and Root Causes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15033/) (2022)
- [Generating Fine-Grained Causality in Climate Time Series Data for Forecasting and Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04254/) (2024)
- [Through the Dual-Prism: A Spectral Perspective on Graph Data Augmentation for Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09953/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Causal Time Series Generation via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20846/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time series anomaly detection has garnered considerable attention across diverse domains. While existing methods often fail to capture the underlying mechanisms behind anomaly generation in time series data. In addition, time series anomaly detection often faces several data-related inherent challenges, i.e., label scarcity, data imbalance, and complex multi-periodicity. In this paper, we leverage causal tools and introduce a new causality-based framework, CaPulse, which tunes in to the underlying causal pulse of time series data to effectively detect anomalies. Concretely, we begin by building a structural causal model to decipher the generation processes behind anomalies. To tackle the challenges posed by the data, we propose Periodical Normalizing Flows with a novel mask mechanism and carefully designed periodical learners, creating a periodicity-aware, density-based anomaly detection approach. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that CaPulse consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving AUROC improvements of 3% to 17%, with enhanced interpretability.