English

Compression-Complexity with Ordinal Patterns for Robust Causal Inference in Irregularly-Sampled Time Series

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability 2022-04-26 v1

Abstract

Distinguishing cause from effect is a scientific challenge resisting solutions from mathematics, statistics, information theory and computer science. Compression-Complexity Causality (CCC) is a recently proposed interventional measure of causality, inspired by Wiener-Granger's idea. It estimates causality based on change in dynamical compression-complexity (or compressibility) of the effect variable, given the cause variable. CCC works with minimal assumptions on given data and is robust to irregular-sampling, missing-data and finite-length effects. However, it only works for one-dimensional time series. We propose an ordinal pattern symbolization scheme to encode multidimensional patterns into one-dimensional symbolic sequences, and thus introduce the Permutation CCC (PCCC), which retains all advantages of the original CCC and can be applied to data from multidimensional systems with potentially hidden variables. PCCC is tested on numerical simulations and applied to paleoclimate data characterized by irregular and uncertain sampling and limited numbers of samples.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.11731,
  title  = {Compression-Complexity with Ordinal Patterns for Robust Causal Inference in Irregularly-Sampled Time Series},
  author = {Aditi Kathpalia and Pouya Manshour and Milan Paluš},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.11731},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

14 pages, 3 figures, 1 table

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:57:56.085Z