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.

通过使用结构因果模型中的因果反事实的定量贡献分析，最近的工作对异常情况的根本原因分析进行了概念化。本文提出了简化、高效的根本原因分析方法，用于识别唯一的根本原因而非定量贡献分析的任务。对于未知因果有向无环图的应用场景，我们将异常得分最高的变量作为根本原因进行启发式验证。

缺失结构知识的异常值根本原因分析