One Thing Leads to Another: The Essentials of Time Series Causal Discovery
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Abstract (arXiv)
Time series causal discovery --- the process of detecting causation between time series --- has its roots in signal processing research from over a half century ago. It has since received active and widespread interest, evolving into different forms across domains such as statistics, dynamical systems and machine learning. Entering this fragmented and constantly evolving research landscape can be daunting. This tutorial provides a unified overview of time series causal discovery across research communities. We introduce the key principles invoked by modern discovery methods, and we discuss their limitations and assumptions. We also discuss how discovery methods are evaluated, benchmarked and fine-tuned. We further discuss how causal discovery for time series is becoming crucial for downstream tasks in agriculture and Earth science, in healthcare, and in artificial intelligence systems. We believe that this tutorial will serve as a valuable resource in navigating the deluge of recent causality research, as well as an invitation to signal processing audiences to contribute to causal problems. To further help readers, we host a companion repository to link to useful code packages and resources at https://github.com/CHAI-UK/Awesome-Time-Series-Causal-Discovery.
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References · 12
- 2017Detecting causal associations in large nonlinear time series datasetscited by 244
- 2020DYNOTEARS: Structure Learning from Time-Series Datacited by 200
- 2021Beware of the Simulated DAG! Causal Discovery Benchmarks May Be Easy To Gamecited by 161
- 2020Amortized Causal Discovery: Learning to Infer Causal Graphs from Time-Series Datacited by 100
- 2020High-recall causal discovery for autocorrelated time series with latent confounderscited by 84
- 2023CausalTime: Realistically Generated Time-series for Benchmarking of Causal Discoverycited by 36
- 2025CausalRivers -- Scaling up benchmarking of causal discovery for real-world time-seriescited by 26
- 2016Causal Discovery from Subsampled Time Series Data by Constraint Optimizationcited by 13
- 2024Embracing the black box: Heading towards foundation models for causal discovery from time series datacited by 7
- 2023Causal Discovery with Stage Variables for Health Time Seriescited by 2
- 2025Causal Ordering for Structure Learning from Time Seriescited by 2
- 2026Rethinking Chronological Causal Discovery with Signal Processingcited by 1
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