Network-based forecasting of climate phenomena.

Network theory, as emerging from complex systems science, can provide critical predictive power for mitigating the global warming crisis and other societal challenges. Here we discuss the main differences of this approach to classical numerical modeling and highlight several cases where the network approach substantially improved the prediction of high-impact phenomena: 1) El Niño events, 2) droughts in the central Amazon, 3) extreme rainfall in the eastern Central Andes, 4) the Indian summer monsoon, and 5) extreme stratospheric polar vortex states that influence the occurrence of wintertime cold spells in northern Eurasia. In this perspective, we argue that network-based approaches can gainfully complement numerical modeling.

Reconstructing regime-dependent causal relationships from observational time series.

Inferring causal relations from observational time series data is a key problem across science and engineering whenever experimental interventions are infeasible or unethical. Increasing data availability over the past few decades has spurred the development of a plethora of causal discovery methods, each addressing particular challenges of this difficult task. In this paper, we focus on an important challenge that is at the core of time series causal discovery: regime-dependent causal relations. Often dynamical systems feature transitions depending on some, often persistent, unobserved background regime, and different regimes may exhibit different causal relations. Here, we assume a persistent and discrete regime variable leading to a finite number of regimes within which we may assume stationary causal relations. To detect regime-dependent causal relations, we combine the conditional independence-based PCMCI method [based on a condition-selection step (PC) followed by the momentary conditional independence (MCI) test] with a regime learning optimization approach. PCMCI allows for causal discovery from high-dimensional and highly correlated time series. Our method, Regime-PCMCI, is evaluated on a number of numerical experiments demonstrating that it can distinguish regimes with different causal directions, time lags, and sign of causal links, as well as changes in the variables' autocorrelation. Furthermore, Regime-PCMCI is employed to observations of El Niño Southern Oscillation and Indian rainfall, demonstrating skill also in real-world datasets.

Detecting and quantifying causal associations in large nonlinear time series datasets.

Identifying causal relationships and quantifying their strength from observational time series data are key problems in disciplines dealing with complex dynamical systems such as the Earth system or the human body. Data-driven causal inference in such systems is challenging since datasets are often high dimensional and nonlinear with limited sample sizes. Here, we introduce a novel method that flexibly combines linear or nonlinear conditional independence tests with a causal discovery algorithm to estimate causal networks from large-scale time series datasets. We validate the method on time series of well-understood physical mechanisms in the climate system and the human heart and using large-scale synthetic datasets mimicking the typical properties of real-world data. The experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in detection power, which opens up entirely new possibilities to discover and quantify causal networks from time series across a range of research fields.

Inferring causation from time series in Earth system sciences.

The heart of the scientific enterprise is a rational effort to understand the causes behind the phenomena we observe. In large-scale complex dynamical systems such as the Earth system, real experiments are rarely feasible. However, a rapidly increasing amount of observational and simulated data opens up the use of novel data-driven causal methods beyond the commonly adopted correlation techniques. Here, we give an overview of causal inference frameworks and identify promising generic application cases common in Earth system sciences and beyond. We discuss challenges and initiate the benchmark platform causeme.net to close the gap between method users and developers.