DVAE: A Dynamic Variational Autoencoder for Structured Causal Discovery with Application in Biomedical Time Series
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Causal discovery in time-series data is critical for analyzing dynamic systems across neuroscience, economics, and biomedical signal processing. Traditional methods, such as Vector Auto-regression (VAR) and constraint-based approaches, struggle with high-dimensional dependencies, nonlinear relationships, and non-stationary dynamics. Deep learning-based models, including cMLP, cLSTM, and VAE-based approaches, aim to address these challenges but suffer from instability, over-pruning, and reliance on sparsity constraints. While cMLP provides lag-specific causal inference, its accuracy is limited, and other methods fail to explicitly capture lag-wise dependencies. This paper introduces DVAE-GC, a structured deep learning framework integrating dynamic variational inference with lag-structured recurrent MLPs (lsrMLP) to explicitly model time-lagged causal dependencies. Unlike prior methods that infer causality via weight sparsity, DVAE-GC progressively refines causal estimation, leveraging a bidirectional recurrent encoder and structured decoder. Additionally, Noise Invalidation Soft Thresholding (NIST) eliminates spurious connections, enhancing interpretability and robustness. Empirically, DVAE-GC outperforms the best baseline (CUTS) on VAR(9) by +18.3 absolute F1 points averaged over multiple noise levels, and on NetSim fMRI-20 by +8.1 absolute F1 points averaged over sequence multiple lengths; in simulated atrial rotor detection, it improves Rotational Activity Estimation Precision (RAEP) by +22.4 % over the best alternative (VAR). These are absolute-point gains, and also precision, recall, and false discovery rate (FDR) has been reported. Although evaluated in biomedical simulations, DVAE-GC applies broadly to time-series domains, including neuroscience, climate science, and financial modeling.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it