On Causal Discovery With Convergent Cross Mapping

Abstract

Convergent cross mapping is a principled causal discovery technique for signals, but its efficacy depends on a number of assumptions about the systems that generated the signals. In this work, we present a self-contained introduction to the theory of causality in state-spaces, Takens' theorem, and cross maps, and we propose conditions to check if a signal is appropriate for cross mapping. Further, we propose simple analyses based on Gaussian processes to test for these conditions in data. We show that our proposed techniques detect when convergent cross mapping may conclude erroneous results using several examples from the literature, and we comment on other considerations that are important when applying methods such as convergent cross mapping.