Causal Discovery in Temporal Domain from Interventional Data

Peiwen Li, Yuan Meng, Xin Wang, Fang Shen, Yue Li, Jialong Wang, Wenwu Zhu

Abstract: Causal learning from observational data has garnered attention as controlled experiments can be costly. To enhance identifiability, incorporating intervention data has become a mainstream approach. However, these methods have yet to be explored in the context of time series data, despite their success in static data. To address this research gap, this paper presents a novel contribution. Firstly, a temporal interventional dataset with causal labels is introduced, derived from a data center IT room of a cloud service company. Secondly, this paper introduces TECDI, a novel approach for temporal causal discovery. TECDI leverages the smooth, algebraic characterization of acyclicity in causal graphs to efficiently uncover causal relationships. Experimental results on simulated and proposed real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of TECDI in accurately uncovering temporal causal relationships. The introduction of the temporal interventional dataset and the superior performance of TECDI contribute to advancing research in temporal causal discovery. Our datasets and codes have released at~\hrefhttps://github.com/lpwpower/TECDI https://github.com/lpwpower/TECDI.