Causal Mechanism Estimation in Multi-Sensor Systems Across Multiple Domains

TL;DR

This paper introduces CICME, a three-step causal inference method for multi-sensor systems across domains, leveraging transfer learning to identify invariant mechanisms and improve causal discovery.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach combining common and individual causal mechanism estimation using causal transfer learning in multi-domain sensor data.

Findings

CICME reliably detects domain-invariant causal mechanisms.

It outperforms baseline methods in linear Gaussian models.

The approach benefits from pooled and domain-specific data analysis.

Abstract

To gain deeper insights into a complex sensor system through the lens of causality, we present common and individual causal mechanism estimation (CICME), a novel three-step approach to inferring causal mechanisms from heterogeneous data collected across multiple domains. By leveraging the principle of Causal Transfer Learning (CTL), CICME is able to reliably detect domain-invariant causal mechanisms when provided with sufficient samples. The identified common causal mechanisms are further used to guide the estimation of the remaining causal mechanisms in each domain individually. The performance of CICME is evaluated on linear Gaussian models under scenarios inspired from a manufacturing process. Building upon existing continuous optimization-based causal discovery methods, we show that CICME leverages the benefits of applying causal discovery on the pooled data and repeatedly on data from individual domains, and it even outperforms both baseline methods under certain scenarios.