Recurrences reveal shared causal drivers of complex time series

Many experimental time series measurements share an unobserved causal driver. Examples include genes targeted by transcription factors, ocean flows influenced by large-scale atmospheric currents, and motor circuits steered by descending neurons. Reliably inferring this unseen driving force is necessary to understand the intermittent nature of top-down control schemes in diverse biological and engineered systems. Here, we introduce a new unsupervised learning algorithm that uses recurrences in time series measurements to gradually reconstruct an unobserved driving signal. Drawing on the mathematical theory of skew-product dynamical systems, we identify recurrence events shared across response time series, which implicitly define a recurrence graph with glass-like structure. As the amount or quality of observed data improves, this recurrence graph undergoes a percolation transition manifesting as weak ergodicity breaking for random walks on the induced landscape -- revealing the shared driver's dynamics, even in the presence of strongly corrupted or noisy measurements. Across several thousand random dynamical systems, we empirically quantify the dependence of reconstruction accuracy on the rate of information transfer from a chaotic driver to the response systems, and we find that effective reconstruction proceeds through gradual approximation of the driver's dominant unstable periodic orbits. Through extensive benchmarks against classical and neural-network-based signal processing techniques, we demonstrate our method's strong ability to extract causal driving signals from diverse real-world datasets spanning neuroscience, genomics, fluid dynamics, and physiology.