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Abstract

It has been demonstrated that the construction of ordinal partition transition networks (OPTNs) from time series provides a prospective approach to improve our understanding of the underlying dynamical system. In this work, we introduce a suite of OPTN based complexity measures to infer the coupling direction between two dynamical systems from pairs of time series. For several examples of coupled stochastic processes, we demonstrate that our approach is able to successfully identify interaction delays of both unidirectional and bidirectional coupling configurations. Moreover, we show that the causal interaction between two coupled chaotic Hénon maps can be captured by the OPTN based complexity measures for a broad range of coupling strengths before the onset of synchronization. Finally, we apply our method to two real-world observational climate time series, disclosing the interaction delays underlying the temperature records from two distinct stations in Oxford and Vienna. Our results suggest that ordinal partition transition networks can be used as complementary tools for causal inference tasks and provide insights into the potentials and theoretical foundations of time series networks. The construction of transition networks from time series is one of the most widely spread methods for time series analysis based on complex network approaches. Transition networks allow to characterize the intrinsic heterogeneity of the state transition behavior of the system, which provides many novel insights supplementing traditional time series analysis methods. However, most existing works on this topic have focused on disclosing properties of a single time series, which calls for a generalization to multivariate analysis. Here, we choose the problem of identifying coupling direction as a showcase to demonstrate that measures quantifying the heterogeneity of state transitions in ordinal partition transition networks can successfully capture unidirectional and bidirectional coupling between paradigmatic models of dynamical systems as well as real-world time series.