Reconstruction of causal graphs for multivariate processes in the presence of missing data

Learning temporal causal relationships between time series is an important tool for the identification of causal network structures in linear dynamic systems from measurements. The main objective in network reconstruction is to identify the causal interactions between the variables and determine the connectivity strengths from time-series data. Among several recently introduced data-driven causality measures, partial directed coherence (PDC), directed partial correlation (DPC) and direct power transfer (DPT) have been shown to be effective in both identifying the causal interactions as well as quantifying the strength of connectivity. However, all the existing approaches assume that the observations are available at all time instants and fail to cater to the case of missing observations. This paper presents a method to reconstruct the causal graph from data with missing observations using sparse optimization (SPOPT) techniques. The method is particularly devised for jointly stationary multivariate processes that have vector autoregressive (VAR) structure representations. Demonstrations on different linear causal dynamic systems illustrate the efficacy of the proposed method with respect to the reconstruction of causal networks.