arXiv:2603.05370cs.LGcs.AI2026-03

提出时间序列因果发现新方法,高效准确识别变量间动态因果关系。

Learning Causal Structure of Time Series using Best Order Score Search

  • 基于排列搜索与缓存优化,提升时序数据因果结构发现效率。
  • 在高自相关场景下,邻接召回率显著优于传统约束方法。
  • 适用于需要精准建模动态依赖的科研与政策分析领域。

从观测数据中学习因果结构是许多科学和政策领域的核心问题,但时间序列设置因时间依赖性带来诸多挑战。本文聚焦多变量时间序列的基于评分的因果发现,提出TS-BOSS,即近期提出的最佳排列评分搜索(BOSS)在时序数据上的扩展。TS-BOSS通过排列搜索动态贝叶斯网络结构,并利用增长-收缩树缓存中间评分计算,在保持静态设置下BOSS的可扩展性和强性能的同时,具备良好的计算效率。我们提供了理论保证,证明在合理假设下TS-BOSS的正确性,并给出一个中间结果,将经典排列方法中的子图最小性结论推广至动态(时间序列)场景。在合成数据上的实验表明,当自相关性较高时,TS-BOSS在相近精度下始终实现更高的邻接召回率,优于标准约束方法。总体而言,TS-BOSS为时间序列因果发现提供了一种高性能、可扩展的方法,其成果为将基于稀疏性与排列驱动的因果学习理论系统性拓展至动态设置提供了坚实基础。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Causal structure learning from observational data is central to many scientific and policy domains, but the time series setting common to many disciplines poses several challenges due to temporal dependence. In this paper we focus on score-based causal discovery for multivariate time series and introduce TS-BOSS, a time series extension of the recently proposed Best Order Score Search (BOSS) (Andrews et al. 2023). TS-BOSS performs a permutation-based search over dynamic Bayesian network structures while leveraging grow-shrink trees to cache intermediate score computations, preserving the scalability and strong empirical performance of BOSS in the static setting. We provide theoretical guarantees establishing the soundness of TS-BOSS under suitable assumptions, and we present an intermediate result that extends classical subgraph minimality results for permutation-based methods to the dynamic (time series) setting. Our experiments on synthetic data show that TS-BOSS is especially effective in high auto-correlation regimes, where it consistently achieves higher adjacency recall at comparable precision than standard constraint-based methods. Overall, TS-BOSS offers a high-performing, scalable approach for time series causal discovery and our results provide a principled bridge for extending sparsity-based, permutation-driven causal learning theory to dynamic settings.

因果发现时间序列动态贝叶斯算法优化

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