Time-Series Causal Discovery

Granger causality identifies predictive dependencies in multivariate time series. In distributed settings where parties cannot share data, federated causal learning enables joint analysis. Most federated causal methods assume that clients observe the same features and infer causal relationships as point estimates, with little formal uncertainty quantification. These assumptions do not hold in many industrial systems, where clients observe different features, and the objective is to estimate cross-client dependencies (edges). These dependencies must be estimated indirectly through repeated client-server iterations. Uncertainty from client data and model parameters propagates through this process, making point estimates alone insufficient for assessing cross-client edges. This paper characterizes this uncertainty propagation and uses edge-specific variances to distinguish genuine cross-client dependencies from spurious estimated edges. We consider aleatoric uncertainty from client data variability and epistemic uncertainty from model parameters. We derive closed-form variance recursions and steady-state variances for the client-server iterations. We prove that the propagated contribution of the initial model-parameter uncertainty vanishes asymptotically. These variances enable statistically principled selection of cross-client edges. Synthetic experiments show that our approach improves cross-client edge recovery over competing baselines. On real-world industrial datasets, it achieves high root-cause identification accuracy while yielding interpretable dependency structures.

Multivariate time series in domains such as finance, climate science, and healthcare often exhibit long-term trends, seasonal patterns, and short-term fluctuations, complicating causal inference under non-stationarity and autocorrelation. Existing causal discovery methods typically operate on raw observations, making them vulnerable to spurious edges and misattributed temporal dependencies. We introduce a decomposition-based causal discovery framework that separates each time series into trend, seasonal, and residual components and performs component-specific causal analysis. Trend components are assessed using stationarity tests, seasonal components using kernel-based dependence measures, and residual components using constraint-based causal discovery. The resulting component-level graphs are integrated into a unified multi-scale causal structure. This approach isolates long- and short-range causal effects, reduces spurious associations, and improves interpretability. Across extensive synthetic benchmarks and real-world climate data, our framework more accurately recovers ground-truth causal structure than state-of-the-art baselines, particularly under strong non-stationarity and temporal autocorrelation.

Granger causality characterizes directed predictive dependencies in multivariate time series, but recovering such dependencies becomes challenging in the presence of latent confounding. Cross-environment invariance provides a natural source of information in heterogeneous settings, yet invariance alone can be insufficient: when latent-to-observed mechanisms remain stable, hidden confounders can induce predictive dependencies that are just as invariant as genuine Granger-causal relations. We show that interventions provide an additional source of identifying information by inducing structured variation in observed mechanisms, while stable latent pathways need not exhibit the same cross-environment changes. In practice, however, neither the intervened environments nor the affected mechanisms are known. We propose GRACE, a framework for learning Granger causality under latent confounding from intervention-induced heterogeneity. GRACE decomposes multivariate dynamics into a shared Granger mechanism, sparse environment-specific deviations that capture edge-level interventions, and a latent component that accounts for confounding. Under a linear generative model, we show that GRACE can recover which environments intervene on a given edge when the edge is perturbed in at least one but fewer than half of the environments and the intervention effect is sufficiently large to survive sparsity shrinkage; the recovered intervention pattern then provides a certificate for the corresponding Granger causal edge. Experiments on synthetic and real-world time series demonstrate improved Granger causal structure recovery under latent confounding and unknown interventions.

We develop and evaluate a structure learning algorithm for clinical time series. Clinical time series are multivariate time series observed in multiple patients and irregularly sampled, challenging existing structure learning algorithms. We assume that our times series are realizations of StructGP, a k-dimensional multi-output or multi-task stationary Gaussian process (GP), with independent patients sharing the same covariance function. StructGP encodes ordered conditional relations between time series, represented in a directed acyclic graph. We implement an adapted NOTEARS algorithm, which based on a differentiable definition of acyclicity, recovers the graph by solving a series of continuous optimization problems. Simulation results show that up to mean degree 3 and 20 tasks, we reach a median recall of 0.93% [IQR, 0.86, 0.97] while keeping a median precision of 0.71% [0.57-0.84], for recovering directed edges. We further show that the regularization path is key to identifying the graph. With StructGP, we proposed a model of time series dependencies, that flexibly adapt to different time series regularity, while enabling us to learn these dependencies from observations.

We introduce a rigorous mathematical framework for Granger causality in extremes, designed to identify causal links from extreme events in time series. Granger causality plays a pivotal role in uncovering directional relationships among time-varying variables. While this notion gains heightened importance during extreme and highly volatile periods, state-of-the-art methods primarily focus on causality within the body of the distribution, often overlooking causal mechanisms that manifest only during extreme events. Our framework is designed to infer causality mainly from extreme events by leveraging the causal tail coefficient. We establish equivalences between causality in extremes and other causal concepts, including (classical) Granger causality, Sims causality, and structural causality. We prove other key properties of Granger causality in extremes and show that the framework is especially helpful under the presence of hidden confounders. We also propose a novel inference method for detecting the presence of Granger causality in extremes from data. Our method is model-free, can handle non-linear and high-dimensional time series, outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in all considered setups, both in performance and speed, and was found to uncover coherent effects when applied to financial and extreme weather observations.