arXiv:2507.03310cs.LGcs.AI2025-07

解决不规则采样时间序列的因果发现,避免补全与因果推断相互干扰。

Causal Discovery for Irregularly Time Series with Consistency Guarantees

  • 基于期望最大化框架,交替优化数据补全与因果结构。
  • 在高缺失率下仍能准确恢复因果图,优于现有方法。
  • 理论保证结构一致性,适合金融、医疗等高风险领域。

本文研究不规则采样时间序列中的因果发现,这是金融、医疗和气候科学等风险敏感领域面临的关键挑战,因数据缺失和采样频率不一致会扭曲因果机制。主要难点在于数据补全与因果结构恢复之间的相互依赖:补全误差与结构学习误差会相互强化,导致因果图失真。现有方法或先补全再发现,或通过神经表示学习联合优化,但缺乏显式机制保障两者的一致性。我们提出ReTimeCausal,一种基于期望最大化(EM)的框架,通过交替进行数据补全与因果结构学习,确保优化过程中的结构一致性。该框架为结构恢复提供了理论一致性保证,并将经典结果拓展至不规则采样和高缺失率场景。ReTimeCausal结合核基稀疏回归与结构约束,在交替过程中依次更新补全数据与因果图。在合成及真实数据集上的实验表明,该方法在复杂不规则采样与高缺失情况下均显著优于现有方法。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

This paper studies causal discovery in irregularly sampled time series-a key challenge in risk-sensitive domains like finance, healthcare, and climate science, where missing data and inconsistent sampling frequencies distort causal mechanisms. The main challenge comes from the interdependence between missing data imputation and causal structure recovery: errors in imputation and structure learning can reinforce each other, leading to an inaccurate causal graph. Existing methods either impute first and then discover, or jointly optimize both via neural representation learning, but lack explicit mechanisms to ensure mutual consistency of imputation and structure learning. We address this challenge with ReTimeCausal, an EM-based framework that alternates between imputation and structure learning, which encourages structural consistency throughout the optimization process. Our framework provides theoretical consistency guarantees for structure recovery and extends classical results to settings with irregular sampling and high missingness. ReTimeCausal combines kernel-based sparse regression and structural constraints in an alternating process that updates the completed data and the causal graph in turn. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that ReTimeCausal is more effective than existing methods under challenging irregular sampling and missing data.

因果发现时间序列数据补全不规则采样

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