# PerCaM-Health: Personalized Dynamic Causal Graphs for Healthcare Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07267 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07267/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [DAGs with NO TEARS: Continuous Optimization for Structure Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01422/) (2018)
- [Med-BERT: pre-trained contextualized embeddings on large-scale structured electronic health records for disease prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12833/) (2020)
- [DAG-GNN: DAG Structure Learning with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10098/) (2019)
- [Learning Representations for Counterfactual Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.03661/) (2016)
- [Scalable and accurate deep learning for electronic health records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07860/) (2018)
- [BEHRT: Transformer for Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09538/) (2019)
- [Detecting causal associations in large nonlinear time series datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07007/) (2017)
- [DYNOTEARS: Structure Learning from Time-Series Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00498/) (2020)
- [Granger Causality: A Review and Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02675/) (2021)
- [HealthQ: Unveiling Questioning Capabilities of LLM Chains in Healthcare Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19487/) (2024)
- [Beyond Sensor Data: Foundation Models of Behavioral Data from Wearables Improve Health Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00191/) (2025)
- [Differential Private Federated Transfer Learning for Mental Health Monitoring in Everyday Settings: A Case Study on Stress Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10862/) (2024)
- [CausalMed: Causality-Based Personalized Medication Recommendation Centered on Patient health state](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12228/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Performance and User Engagement in Everyday Stress Monitoring: A Context-Aware Active Reinforcement Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08215/) (2024)
- [CDF-RAG: Causal Dynamic Feedback for Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12560/) (2025)
- [Optimizing Data-driven Causal Discovery Using Knowledge-guided Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05493/) (2023)
- [MedCoT-RAG: Causal Chain-of-Thought RAG for Medical Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15849/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Expert-Guided Model Averaging for Causal Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16715/) (2026)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Learning of Dynamic Causal Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22532/) (2026)
- [CARE-ECG: Causal Agent-based Reasoning for Explainable and Counterfactual ECG Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10420/) (2026)
- [Person as Population: A Longitudinal View of Single-Subject Causal Inference for Analyzing Self-Tracked Health Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03423/) (2019)
- [Personalized Counterfactual Framework: Generating Potential Outcomes from Wearable Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14432/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personalized healthcare decisions require reasoning about how physiological and behavioral variables influence an individual patient over time. Existing temporal causal discovery methods are poorly matched to this setting: cohort-level models provide stable but non-personalized structures, while per-patient discovery is unreliable because individual trajectories are short, noisy, irregular, and non-stationary. This creates a fundamental gap between population-level causal modeling and the patient-specific, time-varying mechanisms needed for intervention reasoning. We introduce PerCaM-Health, a framework for learning personalized dynamic causal graphs from longitudinal health data. The framework learns a knowledge-guided population temporal graph, then conservatively adapts and evolves it using patient-specific temporal evidence and rolling-window updates, producing interpretable and auditable graph sequences. By coupling these graphs with temporal structural equations, the framework enables patient-level counterfactual queries, such as estimating short-horizon outcome changes under hypothetical behavioral interventions. Experiments on a semi-synthetic dynamic health benchmark show that PerCaM-Health improves graph recovery, dynamic edge tracking, and intervention direction accuracy compared to cohort-level, per-patient, and non-personalized temporal baselines. These results demonstrate that jointly modeling personalization and temporal evolution yields more reliable causal structure and intervention reasoning.