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Main Authors: Hlavackova-Schindler, Katerina, Melnykova, Anna, Tubikanec, Irene
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02027
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author Hlavackova-Schindler, Katerina
Melnykova, Anna
Tubikanec, Irene
author_facet Hlavackova-Schindler, Katerina
Melnykova, Anna
Tubikanec, Irene
contents Multivariate Hawkes processes (MHPs) are versatile probabilistic tools used to model various real-life phenomena: earthquakes, operations on stock markets, neuronal activity, virus propagation and many others. In this paper, we focus on MHPs with exponential decay kernels and estimate connectivity graphs, which represent the Granger causal relations between their components. We approach this inference problem by proposing an optimization criterion and model selection algorithm based on the minimum message length (MML) principle. MML compares Granger causal models using the Occam's razor principle in the following way: even when models have a comparable goodness-of-fit to the observed data, the one generating the most concise explanation of the data is preferred. While most of the state-of-art methods using lasso-type penalization tend to overfitting in scenarios with short time horizons, the proposed MML-based method achieves high F1 scores in these settings. We conduct a numerical study comparing the proposed algorithm to other related classical and state-of-art methods, where we achieve the highest F1 scores in specific sparse graph settings. We illustrate the proposed method also on G7 sovereign bond data and obtain causal connections, which are in agreement with the expert knowledge available in the literature.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_02027
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Granger Causal Inference in Multivariate Hawkes Processes by Minimum Message Length
Hlavackova-Schindler, Katerina
Melnykova, Anna
Tubikanec, Irene
Machine Learning
Multivariate Hawkes processes (MHPs) are versatile probabilistic tools used to model various real-life phenomena: earthquakes, operations on stock markets, neuronal activity, virus propagation and many others. In this paper, we focus on MHPs with exponential decay kernels and estimate connectivity graphs, which represent the Granger causal relations between their components. We approach this inference problem by proposing an optimization criterion and model selection algorithm based on the minimum message length (MML) principle. MML compares Granger causal models using the Occam's razor principle in the following way: even when models have a comparable goodness-of-fit to the observed data, the one generating the most concise explanation of the data is preferred. While most of the state-of-art methods using lasso-type penalization tend to overfitting in scenarios with short time horizons, the proposed MML-based method achieves high F1 scores in these settings. We conduct a numerical study comparing the proposed algorithm to other related classical and state-of-art methods, where we achieve the highest F1 scores in specific sparse graph settings. We illustrate the proposed method also on G7 sovereign bond data and obtain causal connections, which are in agreement with the expert knowledge available in the literature.
title Granger Causal Inference in Multivariate Hawkes Processes by Minimum Message Length
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02027