Root Cause Analysis of Outliers with Missing Structural Knowledge

Abstract: Recent work conceptualized root cause analysis (RCA) of anomalies via quantitative contribution analysis using causal counterfactuals in structural causal models (SCMs).The framework comes with three practical challenges: (1) it requires the causal directed acyclic graph (DAG), together with an SCM, (2) it is statistically ill-posed since it probes regression models in regions of low probability density, (3) it relies on Shapley values which are computationally expensive to find. In this paper, we propose simplified, efficient methods of root cause analysis when the task is to identify a unique root cause instead of quantitative contribution analysis. Our proposed methods run in linear order of SCM nodes and they require only the causal DAG without counterfactuals. Furthermore, for those use cases where the causal DAG is unknown, we justify the heuristic of identifying root causes as the variables with the highest anomaly score. To this end, we prove that anomalies with small scores are unlikely to cause those with large scores and show upper bounds for the likelihood of causal pathways with non-monotonic anomaly scores.