Causal Structural Learning from Time Series: A Convex Optimization Approach

Abstract: Structural learning, which aims to learn directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from observational data, is foundational to causal reasoning and scientific discovery. Recent advancements formulate structural learning into a continuous optimization problem; however, DAG learning remains a highly non-convex problem, and there has not been much work on leveraging well-developed convex optimization techniques for causal structural learning. We fill this gap by proposing a data-adaptive linear approach for causal structural learning from time series data, which can be conveniently cast into a convex optimization problem using a recently developed monotone operator variational inequality (VI) formulation. Furthermore, we establish non-asymptotic recovery guarantee of the VI-based approach and show the superior performance of our proposed method on structure recovery over existing methods via extensive numerical experiments.