학술논문

Towards Dynamic Causal Discovery with Rare Events: A Nonparametric Conditional Independence Test
Document Type
Conference
Source
2023 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) Decision and Control (CDC), 2023 62nd IEEE Conference on. :7610-7616 Dec, 2023
Subject
Computing and Processing
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Robotics and Control Systems
Measurement
Safety
Random variables
Complexity theory
Dynamical systems
Accidents
Language
ISSN
2576-2370
Abstract
Causal phenomena associated with rare events occur across a wide range of engineering problems, such as risk-sensitive safety analysis, accident analysis and prevention, and extreme value theory. However, current methods for causal discovery are often unable to uncover causal links, between random variables in a dynamic setting, that manifest only when the variables first experience low-probability realizations. To address this issue, we introduce a novel statistical independence test on data collected from time-invariant dynamical systems in which rare but consequential events occur. In particular, we exploit the time-invariance of the underlying data to construct a superimposed dataset of the system state before rare events happen at different timesteps. We then design a conditional independence test on the reorganized data. We provide sample complexity bounds for the consistency of our method, and validate its performance across various simulated and real- world datasets, including incident data collected from the Caltrans Performance Measurement System (PeMS).