TimeSleuth: a tool for discovering causal and temporal rules

Abstract

Discovering causal and temporal relations in a system is essential to understanding how it works, and to learning to control the behaviour of the system. TimeSleuth is a causality miner that uses association relations as the basis for the discovery of causal and temporal relations. It does so by introducing time into the observed data. TimeSleuth uses C4.5 as its association discoverer, and by using a series of preprocessing and post-processing techniques to enable the user to try different scenarios for mining causality. The data to be mined should originate sequentially from a single system. TimeSleuth's use of a standard decision tree builder such as C4.5 puts it outside the current mainstream method of discovering causality, which is based on conditional independencies and causal Bayesian networks. This paper introduces TimeSleuth as a tool, and describes its functionality. It is an unsupervised tool that can handle and interpret temporal data. It also helps the user in analyzing the relationships among the attributes. There is also a mechanism to distinguish between causality and acausal relations. The user is thus encouraged to perform experiments and discover the nature of relationships among the data.