提出可解释的时序建模框架,能捕捉趋势与因果关系。
A Self-explainable Model of Long Time Series by Extracting Informative Structured Causal Patterns
- 通过注意力分段+因果图引导解码,提取有结构的时间模式。
- 在多个时序任务上实现高精度预测与稳定解释。
- 适合医疗、金融等需可信决策的高风险场景。
可解释性对建模长时序序列的神经网络至关重要,但现有方法多仅提供逐点重要性评分,无法捕捉趋势、周期和制度变化等时间结构,削弱了人类对长期模型的信任。为此,我们提出四项关键要求:时间连续性、以模式为中心的解释、因果解耦和与模型推理过程的一致性。我们构建了EXCAP统一框架,结合基于注意力的分段器提取连贯时间模式,利用预训练因果图引导的因果结构解码器,并引入隐空间聚合机制确保表示稳定性。理论分析表明,EXCAP能生成平滑稳定的解释,对因果掩码扰动具有鲁棒性。在分类与预测基准上的大量实验显示,EXCAP在保持强预测性能的同时,生成了连贯且因果合理的解释。结果表明,EXCAP为长时序序列的可解释建模提供了原则性且可扩展的方法,适用于医疗、金融等高风险领域。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Explainability is essential for neural networks that model long time series, yet most existing explainable AI methods only produce point-wise importance scores and fail to capture temporal structures such as trends, cycles, and regime changes. This limitation weakens human interpretability and trust in long-horizon models. To address these issues, we identify four key requirements for interpretable time-series modeling: temporal continuity, pattern-centric explanation, causal disentanglement, and faithfulness to the model's inference process. We propose EXCAP, a unified framework that satisfies all four requirements. EXCAP combines an attention-based segmenter that extracts coherent temporal patterns, a causally structured decoder guided by a pre-trained causal graph, and a latent aggregation mechanism that enforces representation stability. Our theoretical analysis shows that EXCAP provides smooth and stable explanations over time and is robust to perturbations in causal masks. Extensive experiments on classification and forecasting benchmarks demonstrate that EXCAP achieves strong predictive accuracy while generating coherent and causally grounded explanations. These results show that EXCAP offers a principled and scalable approach to interpretable modeling of long time series with relevance to high-stakes domains such as healthcare and finance.
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