Mining precise cause and effect rules in large time series data of socio-economic indicators.

Abstract

Discovery of cause–effect relationships, particularly in large databases of time-series is challenging because of continuous data of different characteristics and complex lagged relationships. In this paper, we have proposed a novel approach, to extract cause–effect relationships in large time series data set of socioeconomic indicators. The method enhances the scope of relationship discovery to cause–effect relationships by identifying multiple causal structures such as binary, transitive, many to one and cyclic. We use temporal association and temporal odds ratio to exclude noncausal association and to ensure the high reliability of discovered causal rules. We assess the method with both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our proposed method will help to build quantitative models to analyze socioeconomic processes by generating a precise cause–effect relationship between different economic indicators. The outcome shows that the proposed method can effectively discover existing causality structure in large time series databases.