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DoFlow: Causal Generative Flows for Interventional and Counterfactual Time-Series Prediction

Published: November 4, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2511.02137v1

By: Dongze Wu, Feng Qiu, Yao Xie

Potential Business Impact:

Predicts future events, even if things change.

Business Areas:
Predictive Analytics Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

Time-series forecasting increasingly demands not only accurate observational predictions but also causal forecasting under interventional and counterfactual queries in multivariate systems. We present DoFlow, a flow based generative model defined over a causal DAG that delivers coherent observational and interventional predictions, as well as counterfactuals through the natural encoding and decoding mechanism of continuous normalizing flows (CNFs). We also provide a supporting counterfactual recovery result under certain assumptions. Beyond forecasting, DoFlow provides explicit likelihoods of future trajectories, enabling principled anomaly detection. Experiments on synthetic datasets with various causal DAG and real world hydropower and cancer treatment time series show that DoFlow achieves accurate system-wide observational forecasting, enables causal forecasting over interventional and counterfactual queries, and effectively detects anomalies. This work contributes to the broader goal of unifying causal reasoning and generative modeling for complex dynamical systems.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 United States

Page Count
33 pages

Category
Statistics:
Machine Learning (Stat)