Influence network reconstruction from discrete time-series of count data modelled by multidimensional Hawkes processes

Identifying key influencers from time series data without a known prior network structure is a challenging problem in various applications, from crime analysis to social media. While much work has focused on event-based time series (timestamp) data, fewer methods address count data, where event counts are recorded in fixed intervals. We develop network inference methods for both batched and sequential count data. Here the strong network connection represents the key influences among the nodes. We introduce an ensemble-based algorithm, rooted in the expectation–maximization (EM) framework, and demonstrate its utility to identify node dynamics and connections through a discrete-time Cox or Hawkes process. For the linear multidimensional Hawkes model, we employ a minimization–majorization (MM) approach, allowing for parallelized inference of networks. For sequential inference, we use a second-order approximation of the Bayesian inference problem. Under certain assumptions, a rank-1 update for the covariance matrix reduces computational costs. We validate our methods on synthetic data and real-world datasets, including email communications within European academic communities. Our approach effectively reconstructs underlying networks, accounting for both excitation and diffusion influences. This work advances network reconstruction from count data in real-world scenarios.