同时发现气候变量间的因果关系与隐藏驱动机制,提升气候预测可解释性。
Learning General Causal Structures with Hidden Dynamic Process for Climate Analysis
- 提出统一框架,联合学习可观测变量间因果关系与隐藏动态过程
- 理论证明在非参数条件下仍可识别因果结构与隐藏变量,基于上下文信息恢复
- 模型在真实气候数据上实现精准预测并生成符合领域知识的因果图
理解气候动力学需超越观测数据中的相关性,揭示潜在因果机制。大气过程等隐变量在时间动态中起核心作用,而地理邻近的可观测变量之间也存在直接因果影响。传统因果表示学习(CRL)通常关注隐变量,忽视可观测变量间的因果关系,限制了其在气候分析中的应用。本文提出统一框架,同时发现(i)可观测变量间的因果关系和(ii)隐变量及其相互作用。我们建立了在时间序列数据下同时可识别隐藏动态过程与可观测变量因果结构的条件,并在非参数设定中通过上下文信息恢复隐变量与因果关系。基于此,提出CaDRe(因果发现与表示学习)模型,一种带结构约束的时间序列生成模型,融合了CRL与因果发现。合成数据实验验证理论结果;真实气候数据实验显示,CaDRe具备竞争力的预测精度,并生成与领域知识一致的可视化因果图,为气候系统提供可解释洞察。代码已公开于https://github.com/MinghaoFu/CaDRe。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Understanding climate dynamics requires going beyond correlations in observational data to uncover the underlying causal process. Latent drivers such as atmospheric processes play a central role in temporal dynamics, while direct causal influences also exist among geographically proximate observed variables. Traditional Causal Representation Learning (CRL) typically focuses on latent factors but overlooks such observable-to-observable causal relations, which limits its applicability to climate analysis. In this paper, we introduce a unified framework that jointly uncovers (i) causal relations among observed variables and (ii) latent driving forces together with their interactions. We establish conditions under which both the hidden dynamic process and the causal structure among observed variables are simultaneously identifiable from time-series data, and our guarantees continue to hold in the nonparametric setting through contextual information that recovers latent variables and causal relations. Building on these insights, we propose CaDRe (Causal Discovery and Representation learning), a time-series generative model with structural constraints that integrates CRL and causal discovery. Experiments on synthetic datasets validate our theoretical results. On real-world climate datasets, CaDRe delivers competitive forecasting accuracy and recovers visualized causal graphs aligned with domain expertise, thereby offering interpretable insights into climate systems. Code is available at https://github.com/MinghaoFu/CaDRe.
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