Exploiting Functional Connectivity Inference for Efficient Root Cause Analysis

A crucial step in remedying faults within network infrastructure is to determine their root cause. However, the large-scale, complex and dynamic nature of modern architecture makes root cause analysis challenging. Statistical approaches for causal inference are promising, however, their deployment has been historically limited due to their high time complexity. In this paper we propose a general framework for leveraging the concept of functional connectivity to reduce the computational overhead of causal inference algorithms. We demonstrate on synthetic data that our approach can achieve substantial speedups when combined with state-of-the-art causal discovery algorithms, with only a small cost in terms of loss of causal information in some cases.