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A fundamental issue is that functional connectivity is undirected, operates at a single slow timescale, and cannot reveal causal direction. Moreover, the mismatch between BOLD sampling speed and neural dynamics can hide edges, fabricate spurious ones, and reverse the apparent orientation of causal relationships. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a general framework for estimating directed causal graphs from fMRI that explicitly accounts for temporal undersampling. We apply RnR, a causal discovery method built on the rate-agnostic RASL framework, to resting-state fMRI from the multi-site FBIRN cohort. Rather than returning a single directed graph, RnR recovers an equivalence class of directed graphs consistent with the observed data, each annotated with the sampling rate that would produce it and classifies each estimated orientation by its stability across inferred rates. This provides a principled basis for distinguishing directed interpretations that are safe to trust from those that are timescale-contingent. Benchmarking against five single-timescale estimators on schizophrenia data, RnR recovered substantially more group-differentiating directed edges, reproducing the field\u2019s most replicated finding in directed form: a sensory-to-visual hyperconnectivity hub oriented from the post-central gyrus component to primary visual cortex. Through simulation, we show that coarse spatial resolution has shielded single-timescale methods from the full effects of undersampling, whereas finer parcellations will require explicit undersampling modeling. This work reframes fMRI effective connectivity estimation by treating undersampling as a fundamental property of the measurement, enabling directed interpretations that are grounded in the data-generating process.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.64898\/2026.08.09.743708","type":"posted-content","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,14]],"date-time":"2026-08-14T22:05:16Z","timestamp":1786745116000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Recovering directional brain networks under temporal undersampling: an application to schizophrenia"],"prefix":"10.64898","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0009-7702-2340","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Mohammadsajad","family":"Abavisani","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA"},{"name":"TReNDS Center, Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9252-3604","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Kseniya","family":"Solovyeva","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"TReNDS Center, Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-4541-5966","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"David","family":"Danks","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Philosophy and School of Data Science, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7525-5185","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Godfrey","family":"Pearlson","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9058-0747","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Vince","family":"Calhoun","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"TReNDS Center, Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0040-0365","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Sergey","family":"Plis","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"TReNDS Center, Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA"},{"name":"Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"54368","reference":[{"key":"2026081802300503000_2026.08.09.743708v1.1","unstructured":"M. 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