Conditionally Identifiable Latent Representation for Multivariate Time Series with Structural Dynamics

arXiv:2603.22886 · cs.LG, q-fin.GN, q-fin.ST · Submitted 2026-03-24 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG, q-fin.GN, q-fin.ST

Submitted: 2026-03-24

Updated: 2026-10-18

Comments: Published in Proceedings of The 1st Symposium on Probabilistic Machine Learning (ProbML 2026), PMLR 327:189-213. 25 pages. Code: https://github.com/minkeymouse/iVDFM

Journal ref: Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 327:189-213, 2026

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: We propose the Identifiable Variational Dynamic Factor Model (iVDFM) for multivariate time series.

Terminology

Abstract

We propose the Identifiable Variational Dynamic Factor Model (iVDFM) for multivariate time series. The model combines variational inference with partial identifiability guarantees up to a known ambiguity class. Innovations follow a conditional exponential-family prior over observed auxiliary context and regime embeddings. Linear diagonal dynamics map innovations to factors and preserve that class, so factors are partially identifiable up to permutation and component-wise affine maps. We train by maximizing the ELBO and estimate uncertainty in both latent trajectories and forecasts. Under explicit assumptions, we prove partial identifiability up to the stated class and provide the full proof in the appendix. We evaluate factor recovery on synthetic DGPs, intervention behavior on synthetic SCMs, and forecasting on real benchmarks with CRPS and MSE.

Related papers