A comprehensive study on causal discovery between degradation paths

Abstract

Existing studies indicate that complex system degradation is characterized by degradation of multiple dependent parameters. Capturing the dependencies is crucial for accurate degradation modeling and effective degradation control. This work aims to uncover these dependencies through causal analysis, focusing on pairwise causal discovery. Firstly, considering the steady-state characteristic of physical dependencies between parameters, a causal discovery strategy using degradation increments is proposed combined with non-temporal causal discovery techniques. Then, five types of non-temporal causal discovery techniques, including constraint-based, score-based, functional causal model-based, gradient-based and the emerging ordering-based technique, are selected as benchmark methods to identify the most suitable approach. Numerical studies based on Wiener process are first conducted to investigate the method effectiveness on both independent and causally dependent degradation paths. Additionally, sensitivity analysis is performed to evaluate how degradation process characteristics affect the accuracy of causal discovery. Then, two engineering applications are given to show the practical applicability of the approach, including a second-order multiple-feedback band pass filter and a turbofan engine. Our findings indicate that the proposed strategy, which uses degradation increments, outperforms methods that rely on raw degradation data. Among all evaluated techniques, stable Peter-Clark and greedy equivalence search exhibit robust and accurate performance across both numerical and engineering cases, which are recommended for causal discovery between degradation paths. The code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/dirge1/causal_deg_data.