A Comparative Study of Causality Detection Methods in Root Cause Diagnosis: From Industrial Processes to Brain Networks

Abstract

Abstracting causal knowledge from process measurements has become an appealing topic for decades, especially for fault root cause analysis (RCA) based on signals recorded by multiple sensors in a complex system. Although many causality detection methods have been developed and applied in different fields, some research communities may have an idiosyncratic implementation of their preferred methods, with limited accessibility to the wider community. Targeting interested experimental researchers and engineers, this paper provides a comprehensive comparison of data-based causality detection methods in root cause diagnosis across two distinct domains. We provide a possible taxonomy of those methods followed by descriptions of the main motivations of those concepts. Of the two cases we investigated, one is a root cause diagnosis of plant-wide oscillations in an industrial process, while the other is the localization of the epileptogenic focus in a human brain network where the connectivity pattern is transient and even more complex. Considering the differences in various causality detection methods, we designed several sets of experiments so that for each case, a total of 11 methods could be appropriately compared under a unified and reasonable evaluation framework. In each case, these methods were implemented separately and in a standard way to infer causal interactions among multiple variables to thus establish the causal network for RCA. From the cross-domain investigation, several findings are presented along with insights into them, including an interpretative pitfall that warrants caution.