arXiv subjects

Giacinto Paolo Saggese

Publications and source records attributed to Giacinto Paolo Saggese.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Beyond Accuracy: A Stability-Aware Metric for Multi-Horizon Forecasting

Traditional time series forecasting methods optimize for accuracy alone. This objective neglects temporal consistency, in other words, how consistently a model predicts the same future event as the forecast origin changes. We introduce the forecast accuracy and coherence score (forecast AC score for short) for measuring the quality of probabilistic multi-horizon forecasts in a way that accounts for both multi-horizon accuracy and stability. Our score additionally allows user-specified weights to balance accuracy and consistency requirements. As an example application, we implement the score as a differentiable objective function for training seasonal auto-regressive integrated models and evaluate it on the M4 Hourly benchmark dataset. Results demonstrate consistent improvements over traditional maximum likelihood estimation. Regarding stability, the AC-optimized model generated out-of-sample forecasts with 15.8\% reduced variance over forecasts targeting the same timestamp. In terms of accuracy, the AC-optimized model achieved considerable improvements for medium-to-long-horizon forecasts. While one-step-ahead forecasts exhibited a 3.9\% increase in MSE, forecasts from horizon three onward experienced improved accuracy, with a peak improvement of approximately 6\% in MSE at horizons 9-12. These results indicate that our metric successfully trains models to produce more stable and accurate multi-step forecasts in exchange for a relatively small degradation in one-step-ahead performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

A Benchmark of Causal vs. Correlation AI for Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance in manufacturing environments presents a challenging optimization problem characterized by extreme cost asymmetry, where missed failures incur costs roughly fifty times higher than false alarms. Predictive maintenance in manufacturing environments presents a challenging optimization problem characterized by extreme cost asymmetry, where missed failures incur costs roughly fifty times higher than false alarms. Conventional machine learning approaches typically optimize statistical accuracy metrics that do not reflect this operational reality and cannot reliably distinguish causal relationships from spurious correlations. This study benchmarks eight predictive models, ranging from baseline statistical approaches to Bayesian structural causal methods, on a dataset of 10,000 CNC machines with a 3.3 percent failure prevalence. While ensemble correlation-based models such as Random Forest (L4) achieve the highest raw cost savings (70.8 percent reduction), the Bayesian Structural Causal Model (L7) delivers competitive financial performance (66.4 percent cost reduction) with an inherent ability of failure attribution, which correlation-based models do not readily provide. The model achieves perfect attribution for HDF, PWF, and OSF failure types. These results suggest that causal methods, when combined with domain knowledge and Bayesian inference, offer a potentially favorable trade-off between predictive performance and operational interpretability in predictive maintenance applications.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

DMCD: Semantic-Statistical Framework for Causal Discovery

We present DMCD (DataMap Causal Discovery), a two-phase causal discovery framework that integrates LLM-based semantic drafting from variable metadata with statistical validation on observational data. In Phase I, a large language model proposes a sparse draft DAG, serving as a semantically informed prior over the space of possible causal structures. In Phase II, this draft is audited and refined via conditional independence testing, with detected discrepancies guiding targeted edge revisions. We evaluate our approach on three metadata-rich real-world benchmarks spanning industrial engineering, environmental monitoring, and IT systems analysis. Across these datasets, DMCD achieves competitive or leading performance against diverse causal discovery baselines, with particularly large gains in recall and F1 score. Probing and ablation experiments suggest that these improvements arise from semantic reasoning over metadata rather than memorization of benchmark graphs. Overall, our results demonstrate that combining semantic priors with principled statistical verification yields a high-performing and practically effective approach to causal structure learning.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Causify DataFlow: A Framework For High-performance Machine Learning Stream Computing

We present DataFlow, a computational framework for building, testing, and deploying high-performance machine learning systems on unbounded time-series data. Traditional data science workflows assume finite datasets and require substantial reimplementation when moving from batch prototypes to streaming production systems. This gap introduces causality violations, batch boundary artifacts, and poor reproducibility of real-time failures. DataFlow resolves these issues through a unified execution model based on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) with point-in-time idempotency: outputs at any time t depend only on a fixed-length context window preceding t. This guarantee ensures that models developed in batch mode execute identically in streaming production without code changes. The framework enforces strict causality by automatically tracking knowledge time across all transformations, eliminating future-peeking bugs. DataFlow supports flexible tiling across temporal and feature dimensions, allowing the same model to operate at different frequencies and memory profiles via configuration alone. It integrates natively with the Python data science stack and provides fit/predict semantics for online learning, caching and incremental computation, and automatic parallelization through DAG-based scheduling. We demonstrate its effectiveness across domains including financial trading, IoT, fraud detection, and real-time analytics.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Causal Inference in Energy Demand Prediction

Energy demand prediction is critical for grid operators, industrial energy consumers, and service providers. Energy demand is influenced by multiple factors, including weather conditions (e.g. temperature, humidity, wind speed, solar radiation), and calendar information (e.g. hour of day and month of year), which further affect daily work and life schedules. These factors are causally interdependent, making the problem more complex than simple correlation-based learning techniques satisfactorily allow for. We propose a structural causal model that explains the causal relationship between these variables. A full analysis is performed to validate our causal beliefs, also revealing important insights consistent with prior studies. For example, our causal model reveals that energy demand responds to temperature fluctuations with season-dependent sensitivity. Additionally, we find that energy demand exhibits lower variance in winter due to the decoupling effect between temperature changes and daily activity patterns. We then build a Bayesian model, which takes advantage of the causal insights we learned as prior knowledge. The model is trained and tested on unseen data and yields state-of-the-art performance in the form of a 3.84 percent MAPE on the test set. The model also demonstrates strong robustness, as the cross-validation across two years of data yields an average MAPE of 3.88 percent.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Runnable Directories: The Solution to the Monorepo vs. Multi-repo Debate

Modern software systems increasingly strain traditional codebase organization strategies. Monorepos offer consistency but often suffer from scalability issues and tooling complexity, while multi-repos provide modularity at the cost of coordination and dependency management challenges. As an answer to this trade-off, we present the Causify Dev system, a hybrid approach that integrates key benefits of both. Its central concept is the runnable directory -- a self-contained, independently executable unit with its own development, testing, and deployment lifecycles. Backed by a unified thin environment, shared helper utilities, and containerized Docker-based workflows, runnable directories enable consistent setups, isolated dependencies, and efficient CI/CD processes. The Causify Dev approach provides a practical middle ground between monorepo and multi-repo strategies, improving reliability and maintainability for growing, complex codebases.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

The effect of latency on optimal order execution policy

Market participants regularly send bid and ask quotes to exchange-operated limit order books. This creates an optimization challenge where their potential profit is determined by their quoted price and how often their orders are successfully executed. The expected profit from successful execution at a favorable limit price needs to be balanced against two key risks: (1) the possibility that orders will remain unfilled, which hinders the trading agenda and leads to greater price uncertainty, and (2) the danger that limit orders will be executed as market orders, particularly in the presence of order submission latency, which in turn results in higher transaction costs. In this paper, we consider a stochastic optimal control problem where a risk-averse trader attempts to maximize profit while balancing risk. The market is modeled using Brownian motion to represent the price uncertainty. We analyze the relationship between fill probability, limit price, and order submission latency. We derive closed-form approximations of these quantities that perform well in the practical regime of interest. Then, we utilize a mean-variance method where our total reward function features a risk-tolerance parameter to quantify the combined risk and profit.

q-fin.MF↗