{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/encoding-causal-macrovariables","title":"Encoding Causal Macrovariables","arxiv_id":"2111.14724","date":"2021-11-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Benedikt Höltgen"],"abstract":"In many scientific disciplines, coarse-grained causal models are used to explain and predict the dynamics of more fine-grained systems. Naturally, such models require appropriate macrovariables. Automated procedures to detect suitable variables would be useful to leverage increasingly available high-dimensional observational datasets. This work introduces a novel algorithmic approach that is inspired by a new characterisation of causal macrovariables as information bottlenecks between microstates. Its general form can be adapted to address individual needs of different scientific goals. After a further transformation step, the causal relationships between learned variables can be investigated through additive noise models. Experiments on both simulated data and on a real climate dataset are reported. In a synthetic dataset, the algorithm robustly detects the ground-truth variables and correctly infers the causal relationships between them. In a real climate dataset, the algorithm robustly detects two variables that correspond to the two known variations of the El Nino phenomenon.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.14724v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.14724v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"encoding-causal-macrovariables","repo_url":"https://github.com/benedikthoeltgen/causal-macro","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2111.14724","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2111.14724","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}