A Dynamical View of the Question of Why
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Keywords: Dynamical Causality, Reinforcement Learning
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TL;DR: The current causal theories fail to properly capture temporal information in dynamical processes. We introduce a formal theory that enables establishing causal links in dynamical settings and mathematically cast this as a learning (RL) problem.
Abstract: We address causal reasoning in multivariate time series data generated by stochastic processes. Existing approaches are largely restricted to static settings, ignoring the continuity and emission of variations across time. In contrast, we propose a learning paradigm that directly establishes causation between events in the course of time. We present two key lemmas to compute causal contributions and frame them as reinforcement learning problems. Our approach offers formal and computational tools for uncovering and quantifying causal relationships in diffusion processes, subsuming various important settings such as discrete-time Markov decision processes. Finally, in fairly intricate experiments and through sheer learning, our framework reveals and quantifies causal links, which otherwise seem inexplicable.
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Primary Area: causal reasoning
Submission Number: 4070
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