Root Cause Analysis of Outliers in Unknown Cyclic Graphs

Daniela Schkoda, Dominik Janzing

TL;DR: The proposed method enables root cause analysis in cyclic graphs even when the ground truth is unavailable.

Abstract:

We study the propagation of outliers in cyclic causal graphs with linear structural equations, tracing them back to one or several "root cause" nodes. We show that it is possible to identify a short list of potential root causes provided that the perturbation is sufficiently strong and propagates according to the same structural equations as in the normal mode. This shortlist consists of the true root causes together with those of its parents lying on a cycle with the root cause.
Notably, our method does not require prior knowledge of the causal graph and yields encouraging results on simulated data and real data from biology and cloud computing.

Code Dataset Promise: Yes

Code Dataset Url: https://github.com/DanielaSchkoda/CyclicRCA

Format Confirmation: I agree that I have read and followed the formatting instructions for the camera ready version.

Submission Number: 270