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Combining SHAP and Causal Analysis for Interpretable Fault Detection in Industrial Processes

Santos, Pedro Cortes dos, Rocha, Matheus Becali, Krohling, Renato A

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Industrial processes generate complex data that challenge fault detection systems, often yielding opaque or underwhelming results despite advanced machine learning techniques. This study tackles such difficulties using the Tennessee Eastman Process, a well-established benchmark known for its intricate dynamics, to develop an innovative fault detection framework. Initial attempts with standard models revealed limitations in both performance and interpretability, prompting a shift toward a more tractable approach. By employing SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations), we transform the problem into a more manageable and transparent form, pinpointing the most critical process features driving fault predictions. This reduction in complexity unlocks the ability to apply causal analysis through Directed Acyclic Graphs, generated by multiple algorithms, to uncover the underlying mechanisms of fault propagation. The resulting causal structures align strikingly with SHAP findings, consistently highlighting key process elements-like cooling and separation systems-as pivotal to fault development. Together, these methods not only enhance detection accuracy but also provide operators with clear, actionable insights into fault origins, a synergy that, to our knowledge, has not been previously explored in this context. This dual approach bridges predictive power with causal understanding, offering a robust tool for monitoring complex manufacturing environments and paving the way for smarter, more interpretable fault detection in industrial systems.


Realizing LLMs' Causal Potential Requires Science-Grounded, Novel Benchmarks

Srivastava, Ashutosh, Nagalapatti, Lokesh, Jajoo, Gautam, Vashishtha, Aniket, Krishnamurthy, Parameswari, Sharma, Amit

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Recent claims of strong performance by Large Language Models (LLMs) on causal discovery are undermined by a key flaw: many evaluations rely on benchmarks likely included in pretraining corpora. Thus, apparent success suggests that LLM-only methods, which ignore observational data, outperform classical statistical approaches. We challenge this narrative by asking: Do LLMs truly reason about causal structure, and how can we measure it without memorization concerns? Can they be trusted for real-world scientific discovery? We argue that realizing LLMs' potential for causal analysis requires two shifts: (P.1) developing robust evaluation protocols based on recent scientific studies to guard against dataset leakage, and (P.2) designing hybrid methods that combine LLM-derived knowledge with data-driven statistics. To address P.1, we encourage evaluating discovery methods on novel, real-world scientific studies. We outline a practical recipe for extracting causal graphs from recent publications released after an LLM's training cutoff, ensuring relevance and preventing memorization while capturing both established and novel relations. Compared to benchmarks like BNLearn, where LLMs achieve near-perfect accuracy, they perform far worse on our curated graphs, underscoring the need for statistical grounding. Supporting P.2, we show that using LLM predictions as priors for the classical PC algorithm significantly improves accuracy over both LLM-only and purely statistical methods. We call on the community to adopt science-grounded, leakage-resistant benchmarks and invest in hybrid causal discovery methods suited to real-world inquiry.





Orientability of Causal Relations in Time Series using Summary Causal Graphs and Faithful Distributions

Loranchet, Timothée, Assaad, Charles K.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Understanding causal relations between temporal variables is a central challenge in time series analysis, particularly when the full causal structure is unknown. Even when the full causal structure cannot be fully specified, experts often succeed in providing a high-level abstraction of the causal graph, known as a summary causal graph, which captures the main causal relations between different time series while abstracting away micro-level details. In this work, we present conditions that guarantee the orientability of micro-level edges between temporal variables given the background knowledge encoded in a summary causal graph and assuming having access to a faithful and causally sufficient distribution with respect to the true unknown graph. Our results provide theoretical guarantees for edge orientation at the micro-level, even in the presence of cycles or bidirected edges at the macro-level. These findings offer practical guidance for leveraging SCGs to inform causal discovery in complex temporal systems and highlight the value of incorporating expert knowledge to improve causal inference from observational time series data.


Causal-Copilot: An Autonomous Causal Analysis Agent

Wang, Xinyue, Zhou, Kun, Wu, Wenyi, Singh, Har Simrat, Nan, Fang, Jin, Songyao, Philip, Aryan, Patnaik, Saloni, Zhu, Hou, Singh, Shivam, Prashant, Parjanya, Shen, Qian, Huang, Biwei

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Causal analysis plays a foundational role in scientific discovery and reliable decision-making, yet it remains largely inaccessible to domain experts due to its conceptual and algorithmic complexity. This disconnect between causal methodology and practical usability presents a dual challenge: domain experts are unable to leverage recent advances in causal learning, while causal researchers lack broad, real-world deployment to test and refine their methods. To address this, we introduce Causal-Copilot, an autonomous agent that operationalizes expert-level causal analysis within a large language model framework. Causal-Copilot automates the full pipeline of causal analysis for both tabular and time-series data -- including causal discovery, causal inference, algorithm selection, hyperparameter optimization, result interpretation, and generation of actionable insights. It supports interactive refinement through natural language, lowering the barrier for non-specialists while preserving methodological rigor. By integrating over 20 state-of-the-art causal analysis techniques, our system fosters a virtuous cycle -- expanding access to advanced causal methods for domain experts while generating rich, real-world applications that inform and advance causal theory. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Causal-Copilot achieves superior performance compared to existing baselines, offering a reliable, scalable, and extensible solution that bridges the gap between theoretical sophistication and real-world applicability in causal analysis. A live interactive demo of Causal-Copilot is available at https://causalcopilot.com/.


ProReco: A Process Discovery Recommender System

Huang, Tsung-Hao, Junied, Tarek, Pegoraro, Marco, van der Aalst, Wil M. P.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Process discovery aims to automatically derive process models from historical execution data (event logs). While various process discovery algorithms have been proposed in the last 25 years, there is no consensus on a dominating discovery algorithm. Selecting the most suitable discovery algorithm remains a challenge due to competing quality measures and diverse user requirements. Manually selecting the most suitable process discovery algorithm from a range of options for a given event log is a time-consuming and error-prone task. This paper introduces ProReco, a Process discovery Recommender system designed to recommend the most appropriate algorithm based on user preferences and event log characteristics. ProReco incorporates state-of-the-art discovery algorithms, extends the feature pools from previous work, and utilizes eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques to provide explanations for its recommendations.


Discovering Directly-Follows Graph Model for Acyclic Processes

Shaimov, Nikita, Lomazova, Irina, Mitsyuk, Alexey

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Process mining is the common name for a range of methods and approaches aimed at analysing and improving processes. Specifically, methods that aim to derive process models from event logs fall under the category of process discovery. Within the range of processes, acyclic processes form a distinct category. In such processes, previously performed actions are not repeated, forming chains of unique actions. However, due to differences in the order of actions, existing process discovery methods can provide models containing cycles even if a process is acyclic. This paper presents a new process discovery algorithm that allows to discover acyclic DFG models for acyclic processes. A model is discovered by partitioning an event log into parts that provide acyclic DFG models and merging them while avoiding the formation of cycles. The resulting algorithm was tested both on real-life and artificial event logs. Absence of cycles improves model visual clarity and precision, also allowing to apply cycle-sensitive methods or visualisations to the model.