Papers › Path Signature Area-Based Causal Discovery in Coupled Time Series
Path Signature Area-Based Causal Discovery in Coupled Time Series
Will Glad, Thomas Woolf
Coupled dynamical systems are frequently observed in nature, but often not well understood in terms of their causal structure without additional domain knowledge about the system. Especially when analyzing observational time series data of dynamical systems where it is not possible to conduct controlled experiments, for example time series of climate variables, it can be challenging to determine how features causally influence each other. There are many techniques available to recover causal relationships from data, such as Granger causality, convergent cross mapping, and causal graph structure learning approaches such as PCMCI. Path signatures and their associated signed areas provide a new way to approach the analysis of causally linked dynamical systems, particularly in informing a model-free, data-driven approach to algorithmic causal discovery. With this paper, we explore the use of path signatures in causal discovery and propose the application of confidence sequences to analyze the significance of the magnitude of the signed area between two variables. These confidence sequence regions converge with greater sampling length, and in conjunction with analyzing pairwise signed areas across time-shifted versions of the time series, can help identify the presence of lag/lead causal relationships. This approach provides a new way to define the confidence of a causal link existing between two time series, and ultimately may provide a framework for hypothesis testing to define whether one time series causes another
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections