Conditional Local Independence Testing for Itô processes with Applications to Dynamic Causal Discovery

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Mingzhou, Sun, Xinwei, Wang, Yizhou
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Mingzhou
Sun, Xinwei
Wang, Yizhou
author_facet Liu, Mingzhou
Sun, Xinwei
Wang, Yizhou
contents Inferring causal relationships from dynamical systems is the central interest of many scientific inquiries. Conditional local independence, which describes whether the evolution of one process is influenced by another process given additional processes, is important for causal learning in such systems. In this paper, we propose a hypothesis test for conditional local independence in Itô processes. Our test is grounded in the semimartingale decomposition of the Itô process, with which we introduce a stochastic integral process that is a martingale under the null hypothesis. We then apply a test for the martingale property, quantifying potential deviation from local independence. The test statistics is estimated using the optimal filtering equation. We show the consistency of the estimation, thereby establishing the level and power of our test. Numerical verification and a real-world application to causal discovery in brain resting-state fMRIs are conducted.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_07844
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Conditional Local Independence Testing for Itô processes with Applications to Dynamic Causal Discovery
Liu, Mingzhou
Sun, Xinwei
Wang, Yizhou
Methodology
Machine Learning
Inferring causal relationships from dynamical systems is the central interest of many scientific inquiries. Conditional local independence, which describes whether the evolution of one process is influenced by another process given additional processes, is important for causal learning in such systems. In this paper, we propose a hypothesis test for conditional local independence in Itô processes. Our test is grounded in the semimartingale decomposition of the Itô process, with which we introduce a stochastic integral process that is a martingale under the null hypothesis. We then apply a test for the martingale property, quantifying potential deviation from local independence. The test statistics is estimated using the optimal filtering equation. We show the consistency of the estimation, thereby establishing the level and power of our test. Numerical verification and a real-world application to causal discovery in brain resting-state fMRIs are conducted.
title Conditional Local Independence Testing for Itô processes with Applications to Dynamic Causal Discovery
topic Methodology
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07844