Unified Framework for Causal Discovery and Long-term Forecasting in Non-stationary Environments

Authors: Har Simrat Singh, Biwei Huang
Primary area: causal reasoning
Keywords: causal discovery, long-term forecasting

Abstract:
Non-stationary data is prevalent in various real-world domains such as climate science, economics, and neuroscience, presenting significant challenges for tasks like forecasting and causal discovery from observational data. Existing approaches often operate under the assumption that the data is stationary. In this work, we introduce a unified framework that combines long-term forecasting and causal discovery with non-linear relations in a non-stationary setting. Specifically, we assume that the nonlinear causal relations in the observed space can be transformed into linear relations in the latent space via projections. In addition, we model the non-stationarity in the system as arising from time-varying causal relations.  The proposed model demonstrates that adopting a causal perspective for long-term forecasting not only addresses the limitations of each task but also makes the causal process identifiable, enhances interpretability, and provides more reliable predictions. Moreover, our approach reformulates causal discovery into a scalable, non-parametric deep learning problem. Through experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, we show that our framework outperforms baseline methods in both forecasting and causal discovery, underscoring the benefits of this integrated approach.

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