paper-with-me

Papers

Conditional Attribution for Root Cause Analysis in Time-Series Anomaly Detection

2026-04-19 · Shashank Mishra, Karan Patil, Cedric Schockaert, Didier Stricker, Jason Rambach arxiv

Root cause analysis (RCA) for time-series anomaly detection is critical for the reliable operation of complex real-world systems. Existing explanation methods often rely on unrealistic feature perturbations and ignore temporal and cross-feature dependencies, leading to unreliable attributions. We propose a conditional attribution framework that explains anomalies relative to contextually similar normal system states. Instead of using marginal or randomly sampled baselines, our method retrieves representative normal instances conditioned on the anomalous observation, enabling dependency-preserving and operationally meaningful explanations. To support high-dimensional time-series data, contextual retrieval is performed in learned low-dimensional representations using both variational autoencoder latent spaces and UMAP manifold embeddings. By grounding the retrieval process in the system's learned manifold, this strategy avoids out-of-distribution artifacts and ensures attribution fidelity while maintaining computational efficiency. We further introduce confidence-aware and temporal evaluation metrics for assessing explanation reliability and responsiveness. Experiments on the SWaT and MSDS benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently improves root-cause identification accuracy, temporal localization, and robustness across multiple anomaly detection models. These results highlight the practical utility of conditional attribution for explainable anomaly diagnosis in complex time-series systems. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/dfki-av/Conditional-Attribution-for-Root-Cause-Analysis-in-Time-Series-Anomaly-Detection.

📄 PDF Abstract BibTeX arXiv:2604.17616

Code (0)

등록된 구현이 없습니다.

Tasks

Computational EfficiencyAnomaly Detection

Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반

BALANCE: Bayesian Linear Attribution for Root Cause Localization

2023-01-31 · Chaoyu Chen, Hang Yu, Zhichao Lei, Jianguo Li 외

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) plays an indispensable role in distributed data system maintenance and operations, as it bridges the gap between fault detection and system recovery. Existing works mainly study multidimensional…

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)Fault DetectionFault localizationfeature selection

Why did the distribution change?

2021-02-26 · Kailash Budhathoki, Dominik Janzing, Patrick Bloebaum, Hoiyi Ng

We describe a formal approach based on graphical causal models to identify the "root causes" of the change in the probability distribution of variables. After factorizing the joint distribution into conditional distribut…

Attribute

Causal-discovery-based root-cause analysis and its application in time-series prediction error diagnosis

2024-11-11 · Hiroshi Yokoyama, Ryusei Shingaki, Kaneharu Nishino, Shohei Shimizu 외

Recent rapid advancements of machine learning have greatly enhanced the accuracy of prediction models, but most models remain "black boxes", making prediction error diagnosis challenging, especially with outliers. This l…

Causal DiscoveryPredictionTime SeriesTime Series Prediction

TraceBench: Controlled Evaluation of LLM Agents for Time-Series Root-Cause Attribution

2026-08-27 · Tommaso Bendinelli, Artur Dox, Christian Holz arxiv

LLM agents are increasingly applied to anomaly detection and root-cause analysis in time-series observations collected from real-world systems; however, their performance on these tasks has not been systematically evalua…

Anomaly Detection

An Influence-based Approach for Root Cause Alarm Discovery in Telecom Networks

2021-05-07 · Keli Zhang, Marcus Kalander, Min Zhou, Xi Zhang 외

Alarm root cause analysis is a significant component in the day-to-day telecommunication network maintenance, and it is critical for efficient and accurate fault localization and failure recovery. In practice, accurate a…

Causal InferenceFault localizationGraph LearningNetwork Embedding