Understanding Overlap in Automatic Root Cause Analysis in Manufacturing Using Causal Inference

Overlap has been identified in previous works as a significant obstacle to automated diagnosis using data mining algorithms, since it makes it impossible to discern how each machine influences product quality. Several solutions that handle overlap have been proposed, but the final result is a list of potential overlapped root causes. The goal of this paper is to develop a solution resilient to overlap that can determine the true root cause from a list of possible root causes, when possible, and determine the conditions in which it is possible to identify the root causes. This allows for a better understanding of overlap, and enables the development of a fully automatic root cause analysis for manufacturing. To do so, we propose an automatic root cause analysis approach that uses causal inference and
do
calculus to determine the true root cause. The proposed approach was validated on simulated and real case-study data, and allowed for an estimation of the effect of a product passing through a certain machine while disregarding the effect of overlap, in certain conditions. The results were on par with the state-of-the-art solutions capable of handling overlap. The contributions of this paper are a graphical definition of overlap, the identification of the conditions in which is possible to overcome the effect of overlap, and a solution that can present a single true root cause when such conditions are met.