提出新方法解析多变量系统的协同因果关系,让复杂系统因果分析更可计算。
Partial Effective Information Decomposition for Synergistic Causality

- 基于最大熵干预分解源变量对目标的独有与协同信息
- 在真实数据上验证可识别站点间可解释的因果结构
- 适合研究复杂系统跨尺度、多变量协同机制的研究者
因果关系是科学探究的核心,但在复杂系统中,协同因果关系的识别与分析仍面临根本性挑战。现有基于干预的多变量因果分解框架尚不完善。为此,本文提出部分有效信息分解(PEID),在最大熵干预下将多个源变量对目标变量的影响分解为独有与协同信息,提供统一且可计算的协同因果表征。理论上,三变量情形下该框架满足部分信息分解(PID)的主要公理。实证上,最大熵干预消除输入变量间的相关性,使冗余消失,从而可准确计算协同关系。进一步,基于该框架可构建含超边的因果图及向下因果关系,形成分析复杂系统跨尺度、多变量因果机制的统一工具。最后,在KnowAir-V2空气质量管理任务中应用,证明PEID能从学习到的动力学模型中提取可解释的站点间因果结构。结果表明,PEID为复杂系统中的多变量协同因果机制分析提供了通用的信息论干预工具。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Causality is a central topic in scientific inquiry, yet for complex systems, the identification and analysis of synergistic causation remain a challenging and fundamental problem. In the context of causal relations among multivariate variables, a decomposition framework grounded in interventionist causation is still lacking. To address this gap, this paper proposes Partial Effective Information Decomposition (PEID), a framework that decomposes the influence of multiple source variables on a target variable under maximum-entropy interventions into unique and synergistic information, thereby providing a unified and computable characterization of synergistic causal relations. Theoretically, in the three-variable case, the proposed framework is compatible with the major axioms of Partial Information Decomposition (PID). Empirically, under maximum-entropy interventions, correlations among input variables are removed, causing redundancy to vanish and thereby enabling PEID to compute synergistic relations. Furthermore, based on this framework, it is possible to define causal graphs containing hyperedges as well as downward causation, thus offering a unified toolkit for analyzing cross-scale and multivariate causal mechanisms in complex systems. Finally, applying the framework to a machine-learning-based air quality forecasting task on KnowAir-V2, we demonstrate that PEID can extract interpretable inter-station causal structures from a learned dynamical model. These results suggest that PEID provides a general interventionist information-theoretic tool for analyzing multivariate and synergistic causal mechanisms in complex systems.
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