Causal Discovery from Interval-Based Event Sequences

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of discovering causal relationships from observational event sequence data. Existing methods typically assume that events are instantaneous point events, however in many real-world settings, events have duration. For example, in healthcare, a patient's symptoms may persist over a time interval and influence clinical actions while ongoing. To address this, we introduce a causal model for interval-based event sequences that captures rich causal structures, including interactions between events and causal mechanisms that depend on whether other events are ongoing. We prove that our model is identifiable in the limit and present a practical causal discovery algorithm, Niagara, grounded in the algorithmic Markov condition. To select among candidate models, we employ a minimum description length (MDL) criterion, enabling robust inference even with limited data. We validate our approach on synthetic and real data and demonstrate its utility on a real-world medical case study, where it uncovers meaningful causal relationships from noisy, interval-based event data.