Causal Anomaly Detection for Lithium-Ion Battery Degradation

TL;DR

This paper introduces CausalHealth, a causal graph-based framework for early, interpretable detection of lithium-ion battery degradation using routine telemetry data, achieving high detection accuracy and physical grounding.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel causal graph discovery approach combined with transfer entropy to characterize battery health, with a new reliability-weighted index improving early detection.

Findings

100% detection rate across all tested cells.

Lead time up to 402 cycles before capacity failure.

Transfer entropy correlates strongly with charge-transfer resistance.

Abstract

Reliable early detection of lithium-ion battery degradation requires health indicators that are physically interpretable and computable from routine cycler telemetry without access to the degradation region. We introduce \textsc{CausalHealth}, a framework that applies causal graph discovery and $k$-nearest-neighbour transfer entropy to per-cycle voltage, current, temperature, and resistance time series, and organises twelve resulting anomaly scores into three signal-class bundles (Magnitude-shift, Predictive-residual, Complexity-entropy) -- with Isolation Forest reported separately as it falls below the bundle reliability threshold -- to characterise detection sensitivity across ten commissioning fractions (5--30\,\%). The Magnitude-shift class achieves 100\,\% detection across all seven tested cells spanning LFP (MIT--Stanford MATR) and LCO (NASA PCoE, CALCE CS2) chemistries, with a lead time of up to 402 cycles before conventional capacity-threshold failure on gradual-fade cells. A Reliability-Weighted Master Health Index (RWMHI) -- a cross-bundle fusion of five high-reliability detectors weighted by inverse coefficient of variation -- improves lead time by 15--52 cycles over the class median on long-lived cells while maintaining 100\,\% detection. Validation against electrochemical impedance spectroscopy on an NMC prismatic cell provides independent physical grounding: transfer entropy $\mathrm{TE}(R \!\to\! V)$ correlates with charge-transfer resistance $R_{\mathrm{ct}}$ (pooled $r = +0.990$; temperature-controlled partial $r = +0.898$), and an Arrhenius analysis of both quantities yields an activation energy consistent with published NMC charge-transfer kinetics. These results are evaluated on seven cells across three benchmark datasets.