LEARNING GRANGER CAUSALITY GRAPHS FOR MULTIVARIATE NONLINEAR TIME SERIES

An information theory method is proposed to test the. Granger causality and contemporaneous conditional independence in Granger causality graph models. In the graphs, the vertex set denotes the component series of the multivariate time series, and the directed edges denote causal dependence, while the undirected edges reflect the instantaneous dependence. The presence of the edges is measured by a statistics based on conditional mutual information and tested by a permutation procedure. Furthermore, for the existed relations, a statistics based on the difference between general conditional mutual information and linear conditional mutual information is proposed to test the nonlinearity. The significance of the nonlinear test statistics is determined by a bootstrap method based on surrogate data. We investigate the finite sample behavior of the procedure through simulation time series with different dependence structures, including linear and nonlinear relations.

Intelligent diagnosis of jaundice with dynamic uncertain causality graph model

Jaundice is a common and complex clinical symptom potentially occurring in hepatology, general surgery, pediatrics, infectious diseases, gynecology, and obstetrics, and it is faidy difficult to distinguish the cause of jaundice in clinical practice, especially for general practitioners in less developed regions. With collaboration between physicians and artificial intelligence engineers, a comprehensive knowledge base relevant to jaundice was created based on demographic information, symptoms, physical signs, laboratory tests, imaging diagnosis, medical histories, and risk factors. Then a diagnostic modeling and reasoning system using the dynamic uncertain causality graph was proposed. A modularized modeling scheme was presented to reduce the complexity of model construction, providing multiple perspectives and arbitrary granularity for disease causality representations. A ＂chaining＂ inference algorithm and weighted logic operation mechanism were employed to guarantee the exactness and efficiency of diagnostic rea- soning under situations of incomplete and uncertain information. Moreover, the causal interactions among diseases and symptoms intuitively demonstrated the reasoning process in a graphical manner. Verification was performed using 203 randomly pooled clinical cases, and the accuracy was 99.01% and 84.73%, respectively, with or without laboratory tests in the model. The solutions were more explicable and convincing than common methods such as Bayesian Networks, further increasing the objectivity of clinical decision-making. The promising results indicated that our model could be potentially used in intelligent diagnosis and help decrease public health expenditure.

Efficacy of intelligent diagnosis with a dynamic uncertain causality graph model for rare disorders of sex development

Disorders of sex development(DSD)are a group of rare complex clinical syndromes with multiple etiologies.Distinguishing the various causes of DSD is quite difficult in clinical practice,even for senior general physicians because of the similar and atypical clinical manifestations of these conditions.In addition,DSD are difficult to diagnose because most primary doctors receive insufficient training for DSD.Delayed diagnoses and misdiagnoses are common for patients with DSD and lead to poor treatment and prognoses.On the basis of the principles and algorithms of dynamic uncertain causality graph(DUCG),a diagnosis model for DSD was jointly constructed by experts on DSD and engineers of artificial intelligence.“Chaining”inference algorithm and weighted logic operation mechanism were applied to guarantee the accuracy and efficiency of diagnostic reasoning under incomplete situations and uncertain information.Verification was performed using 153 selected clinical cases involving nine common DSD-related diseases and three causes other than DSD as the differential diagnosis.The model had an accuracy of 94.1%,which was significantly higher than that of interns and third-year residents.In conclusion,the DUCG model has broad application prospects as a computer-aided diagnostic tool for DSDrelated diseases.

Developing a Why–How Question Answering system on community web boards with a causality graph including procedural knowledge

The research aims to develop an automatic Question Answering system,in particular Why and How questions,on community web-boards to support ordinary people in preliminary diagnosis and problem solving,such as plant disease problems.The research includes two main problems:Why and How question identification and Why and How answer determination,where Why and How questions are based on explanations.Therefore,the research applies machine learning techniques for question type identification.We also propose an integrated causality graph with extracted procedural knowledge from text to determine the visualized answers based on the information retrieval technique.The experiment shows the Question Answering system can achieve answers at Rank 1 with 91.1%and 88.9%correctness for Why questions and How questions,respectively.

Integrated causal inference modeling uncovers novel causal factors and potential therapeutic targets of Qingjin Yiqi granules for chronic fatigue syndrome

Objective:Chronic fatigue syndrome(CFS)is a prevalent symptom of post-coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19)and is associated with unclear disease mechanisms.The herbal medicine Qingjin Yiqi granules(QJYQ)constitute a clinically approved formula for treating post-COVID-19;however,its potential as a drug target for treating CFS remains largely unknown.This study aimed to identify novel causal factors for CFS and elucidate the potential targets and pharmacological mechanisms of action of QJYQ in treating CFS.Methods:This prospective cohort analysis included 4,212 adults aged≥65 years who were followed up for 7 years with 435 incident CFS cases.Causal modeling and multivariate logistic regression analysis were performed to identify the potential causal determinants of CFS.A proteome-wide,two-sample Mendelian randomization(MR)analysis was employed to explore the proteins associated with the identified causal factors of CFS,which may serve as potential drug targets.Furthermore,we performed a virtual screening analysis to assess the binding affinity between the bioactive compounds in QJYQ and CFS-associated proteins.Results:Among 4,212 participants(47.5%men)with a median age of 69 years(interquartile range:69–70 years)enrolled in 2004,435 developed CFS by 2011.Causal graph analysis with multivariate logistic regression identified frequent cough(odds ratio:1.74,95%confidence interval[CI]:1.15–2.63)and insomnia(odds ratio:2.59,95%CI:1.77–3.79)as novel causal factors of CFS.Proteome-wide MR analysis revealed that the upregulation of endothelial cell-selective adhesion molecule(ESAM)was causally linked to both chronic cough(odds ratio:1.019,95%CI:1.012–1.026,P=2.75 e^(−05))and insomnia(odds ratio:1.015,95%CI:1.008–1.022,P=4.40 e^(−08))in CFS.The major bioactive compounds of QJYQ,ginsenoside Rb2(docking score:−6.03)and RG4(docking score:−6.15),bound to ESAM with high affinity based on virtual screening.Conclusions:Our integrated analytical framework combining epidemiological,genetic,and in silico data provides a novel strategy for elucidating complex disease mechanisms,such as CFS,and informing models of action of traditional Chinese medicines,such as QJYQ.Further validation in animal models is warranted to confirm the potential pharmacological effects of QJYQ on ESAM and as a treatment for CFS.

TDLens:Toward an Empirical Evaluation of Provenance Graph-Based Approach to Cyber Threat Detection

To combat increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks,the security community has proposed and deployed a large body of threat detection approaches to discover malicious behaviors on host systems and attack payloads in network traffic.Several studies have begun to focus on threat detection methods based on provenance data of host-level event tracing.On the other side,with the significant development of big data and artificial intelligence technologies,large-scale graph computing has been widely used.To this end,kinds of research try to bridge the gap between threat detection based on host log provenance data and graph algorithm,and propose the threat detection algorithm based on system provenance graph.These approaches usually generate the system provenance graph via tagging and tracking of system events,and then leverage the characteristics of the graph to conduct threat detection and attack investigation.For the purpose of deeply understanding the correctness,effectiveness,and efficiency of different graph-based threat detection algorithms,we pay attention to mainstream threat detection methods based on provenance graphs.We select and implement 5 state-of-the-art threat detection approaches among a large number of studies as evaluation objects for further analysis.To this end,we collect about 40GB of host-level raw log data in a real-world IT environment,and simulate 6 types of cyber attack scenarios in an isolated environment for malicious provenance data to build our evaluation datasets.The crosswise comparison and longitudinal assessment interpret in detail these detection approaches can detect which attack scenarios well and why.Our empirical evaluation provides a solid foundation for the improvement direction of the threat detection approach.

A Kind of Fuzzy Causal Diagnosis Method

Aim To improve the causal diagnosis method presented by Bandekar and propose a new method of finding the root fault order according to the fault possibility by means of numerical calculation. Methods Based on the causal graph, by utilization of fuzzified threshold value and fuzzy discrimination matrix, a kind of fuzzy causal diagnosis method was given and the fault possibility of each elements in the root fault candidate set (RFCS) was obtained. Results and Conclusion The order of each element in the RFCS can be obtained by the fault possibility, which makes the location of fault much easier. The diagnosis speed of this method is quite high, and by means of the fuzzified threshold value and fuzzy discrimination matrix, the result is more robust to noises and bad parameter's choice.

Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Transfer Entropy Graph

Multivariate Time Series(MTS)forecasting is an essential problem in many fields.Accurate forecasting results can effectively help in making decisions.To date,many MTS forecasting methods have been proposed and widely applied.However,these methods assume that the predicted value of a single variable is affected by all other variables,ignoring the causal relationship among variables.To address the above issue,we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning model,termed graph neural network with neural Granger causality,namely CauGNN,in this paper.To characterize the causal information among variables,we introduce the neural Granger causality graph in our model.Each variable is regarded as a graph node,and each edge represents the casual relationship between variables.In addition,convolutional neural network filters with different perception scales are used for time series feature extraction,to generate the feature of each node.Finally,the graph neural network is adopted to tackle the forecasting problem of the graph structure generated by the MTS.Three benchmark datasets from the real world are used to evaluate the proposed CauGNN,and comprehensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results in the MTS forecasting task.

Causality Analysis of Futures Sugar Prices in Zhengzhou Based on Graphical Models for Multivariate Time Series

This paper presents a method of constructing a mixed graph which can be used to analyze the causality for multivariate time series.We construct a partial correlation graph at first which is an undirected graph.For every undirected edge in the partial correlation graph,the measures of linear feedback between two time series can help us decide its direction,then we obtain the mixed graph.Using this method,we construct a mixed graph for futures sugar prices in Zhengzhou（ZF）,spot sugar prices in Zhengzhou（ZS） and futures sugar prices in New York（NF）.The result shows that there is a bi-directional causality between ZF and ZS,an unidirectional causality from NF to ZF,but no causality between NF and ZS.

LEARNING CAUSAL GRAPHS OF NONLINEAR STRUCTURAL VECTOR AUTOREGRESSIVE MODEL USING INFORMATION THEORY CRITERIA

Detection and clarification of cause-effect relationships among variables is an important problem in time series analysis. Traditional causality inference methods have a salient limitation that the model must be linear and with Gaussian noise. Although additive model regression can effectively infer the nonlinear causal relationships of additive nonlinear time series, it suffers from the limitation that contemporaneous causal relationships of variables must be linear and not always valid to test conditional independence relations. This paper provides a nonparametric method that employs both mutual information and conditional mutual information to identify causal structure of a class of nonlinear time series models, which extends the additive nonlinear times series to nonlinear structural vector autoregressive models. An algorithm is developed to learn the contemporaneous and the lagged causal relationships of variables. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the nroosed method.

LEARNING MULTIVARIATE TIME SERIES CAUSAL GRAPHS BASED ON CONDITIONAL MUTUAL INFORMATION

Detection and clarification of cause-effect relationships among variables is an important problem in time series analysis.This paper provides a method that employs both mutual information and conditional mutual information to identify the causal structure of multivariate time series causal graphical models.A three-step procedure is developed to learn the contemporaneous and the lagged causal relationships of time series causal graphs.Contrary to conventional constraint-based algorithm, the proposed algorithm does not involve any special kinds of distribution and is nonparametric.These properties are especially appealing for inference of time series causal graphs when the prior knowledge about the data model is not available.Simulations and case analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.

Instance-sequence reasoning for video question answering

Video question answering(Video QA)involves a thorough understanding of video content and question language,as well as the grounding of the textual semantic to the visual content of videos.Thus,to answer the questions more accurately,not only the semantic entity should be associated with certain visual instance in video frames,but also the action or event in the question should be localized to a corresponding temporal slot.It turns out to be a more challenging task that requires the ability of conducting reasoning with correlations between instances along temporal frames.In this paper,we propose an instance-sequence reasoning network for video question answering with instance grounding and temporal localization.In our model,both visual instances and textual representations are firstly embedded into graph nodes,which benefits the integration of intra-and inter-modality.Then,we propose graph causal convolution(GCC)on graph-structured sequence with a large receptive field to capture more causal connections,which is vital for visual grounding and instance-sequence reasoning.Finally,we evaluate our model on TVQA+dataset,which contains the groundtruth of instance grounding and temporal localization,three other Video QA datasets and three multimodal language processing datasets.Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method.Specifically,our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on these benchmarks.