Doubly Robust Structure Identification from Temporal Data

Emmanouil Angelis, Francesco Quinzan, Ashkan Soleymani, Patrick Jaillet, Stefan Bauer

Primary Area: causal reasoning

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Keywords: causal discovery, time series, double machine learning

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TL;DR: We propose a new method based on double machine learning, to learn causal structure from temporal data.

Abstract: Learning the causes of time-series data is a fundamental task in many applications, spanning from finance to earth sciences or bio-medical applications. Common approaches for this task are based on vector auto-regression, and they do not take into account unknown confounding between potential causes. However, in settings with many potential causes and noisy data, these approaches may be substantially biased. Furthermore, potential causes may be correlated in practical applications. Moreover, existing algorithms often do not work with cyclic data. To address these challenges, we propose a new doubly robust method for Structure Identification from Temporal Data (SITD). We provide theoretical guarantees, showing that our method asymptotically recovers the true underlying causal structure. Our analysis extends to cases where the potential causes have cycles and they may be confounded. We further perform extensive experiments to showcase the superior performance of our method.

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Submission Number: 231