English

Graphs in State-Space Models for Granger Causality in Climate Science

Machine Learning 2023-07-21 v1

Abstract

Granger causality (GC) is often considered not an actual form of causality. Still, it is arguably the most widely used method to assess the predictability of a time series from another one. Granger causality has been widely used in many applied disciplines, from neuroscience and econometrics to Earth sciences. We revisit GC under a graphical perspective of state-space models. For that, we use GraphEM, a recently presented expectation-maximisation algorithm for estimating the linear matrix operator in the state equation of a linear-Gaussian state-space model. Lasso regularisation is included in the M-step, which is solved using a proximal splitting Douglas-Rachford algorithm. Experiments in toy examples and challenging climate problems illustrate the benefits of the proposed model and inference technique over standard Granger causality methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.10703,
  title  = {Graphs in State-Space Models for Granger Causality in Climate Science},
  author = {Víctor Elvira and Émilie Chouzenoux and Jordi Cerdà and Gustau Camps-Valls},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.10703},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

4 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables, CausalStats23: When Causal Inference meets Statistical Analysis, April 17-21, 2023, Paris, France

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:35:41.657Z