Causal Structure Learning in Hawkes Processes with Complex Latent Confounder Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Jin, Songyao, Huang, Biwei
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Jin, Songyao
Huang, Biwei
author_facet Jin, Songyao
Huang, Biwei
contents Multivariate Hawkes process provides a powerful framework for modeling temporal dependencies and event-driven interactions in complex systems. While existing methods primarily focus on uncovering causal structures among observed subprocesses, real-world systems are often only partially observed, with latent subprocesses posing significant challenges. In this paper, we show that continuous-time event sequences can be represented by a discrete-time causal model as the time interval shrinks, and we leverage this insight to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for identifying latent subprocesses and the causal influences. Accordingly, we propose a two-phase iterative algorithm that alternates between inferring causal relationships among discovered subprocesses and uncovering new latent subprocesses, guided by path-based conditions that guarantee identifiability. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that our method effectively recovers causal structures despite the presence of latent subprocesses.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_11727
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal Structure Learning in Hawkes Processes with Complex Latent Confounder Networks
Jin, Songyao
Huang, Biwei
Machine Learning
Multivariate Hawkes process provides a powerful framework for modeling temporal dependencies and event-driven interactions in complex systems. While existing methods primarily focus on uncovering causal structures among observed subprocesses, real-world systems are often only partially observed, with latent subprocesses posing significant challenges. In this paper, we show that continuous-time event sequences can be represented by a discrete-time causal model as the time interval shrinks, and we leverage this insight to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for identifying latent subprocesses and the causal influences. Accordingly, we propose a two-phase iterative algorithm that alternates between inferring causal relationships among discovered subprocesses and uncovering new latent subprocesses, guided by path-based conditions that guarantee identifiability. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that our method effectively recovers causal structures despite the presence of latent subprocesses.
title Causal Structure Learning in Hawkes Processes with Complex Latent Confounder Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11727