Detecting causal associations in large nonlinear time series datasets
Identifying causal relationships from observational time series data is a key problem in disciplines such as climate science or neuroscience, where experiments are often not possible. Data-driven causal inference is challenging since datasets are often high-dimensional and nonlinear with limited sam...
| Những tác giả chính: | , , , , |
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| Định dạng: | Journal article |
| Được phát hành: |
American Association for the Advancement of Science
2019
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| Tóm tắt: | Identifying causal relationships from observational time series data is a key problem in disciplines such as climate science or neuroscience, where experiments are often not possible. Data-driven causal inference is challenging since datasets are often high-dimensional and nonlinear with limited sample sizes. Here we introduce a novel method that flexibly combines linear or nonlinear conditional independence tests with a causal discovery algorithm that allows to reconstruct causal networks from large-scale time series datasets. We validate the method on a well-established climatic teleconnection connecting the tropical Pacific with extra-tropical temperatures and using large-scale synthetic datasets mimicking the typical properties of real data. The experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms alternative techniques in detection power from small to large-scale datasets and opens up entirely new possibilities to discover causal networks from time series across a range of research fields. |
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