1,170 research outputs found

    Interpretable Credit Application Predictions With Counterfactual Explanations

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    International audienceWe predict credit applications with off-the-shelf, interchangeable black-box clas-sifiers and we explain single predictions with counterfactual explanations. Coun-terfactual explanations expose the minimal changes required on the input data to obtain a different result e.g., approved vs rejected application. Despite their effectiveness , counterfactuals are mainly designed for changing an undesired outcome of a prediction i.e. loan rejected. Counterfactuals, however, can be difficult to interpret , especially when a high number of features are involved in the explanation. Our contribution is twofold: i) we propose positive counterfactuals, i.e. we adapt counterfactual explanations to also explain accepted loan applications, and ii) we propose two weighting strategies to generate more interpretable counterfactuals. Experiments on the HELOC loan applications dataset show that our contribution outperforms the baseline counterfactual generation strategy, by leading to smaller and hence more interpretable counterfactuals

    Explaining Data-Driven Decisions made by AI Systems: The Counterfactual Approach

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    We examine counterfactual explanations for explaining the decisions made by model-based AI systems. The counterfactual approach we consider defines an explanation as a set of the system's data inputs that causally drives the decision (i.e., changing the inputs in the set changes the decision) and is irreducible (i.e., changing any subset of the inputs does not change the decision). We (1) demonstrate how this framework may be used to provide explanations for decisions made by general, data-driven AI systems that may incorporate features with arbitrary data types and multiple predictive models, and (2) propose a heuristic procedure to find the most useful explanations depending on the context. We then contrast counterfactual explanations with methods that explain model predictions by weighting features according to their importance (e.g., SHAP, LIME) and present two fundamental reasons why we should carefully consider whether importance-weight explanations are well-suited to explain system decisions. Specifically, we show that (i) features that have a large importance weight for a model prediction may not affect the corresponding decision, and (ii) importance weights are insufficient to communicate whether and how features influence decisions. We demonstrate this with several concise examples and three detailed case studies that compare the counterfactual approach with SHAP to illustrate various conditions under which counterfactual explanations explain data-driven decisions better than importance weights

    Explaining Machine Learning Classifiers through Diverse Counterfactual Explanations

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    Post-hoc explanations of machine learning models are crucial for people to understand and act on algorithmic predictions. An intriguing class of explanations is through counterfactuals, hypothetical examples that show people how to obtain a different prediction. We posit that effective counterfactual explanations should satisfy two properties: feasibility of the counterfactual actions given user context and constraints, and diversity among the counterfactuals presented. To this end, we propose a framework for generating and evaluating a diverse set of counterfactual explanations based on determinantal point processes. To evaluate the actionability of counterfactuals, we provide metrics that enable comparison of counterfactual-based methods to other local explanation methods. We further address necessary tradeoffs and point to causal implications in optimizing for counterfactuals. Our experiments on four real-world datasets show that our framework can generate a set of counterfactuals that are diverse and well approximate local decision boundaries, outperforming prior approaches to generating diverse counterfactuals. We provide an implementation of the framework at https://github.com/microsoft/DiCE.Comment: 13 page

    Local Rule-Based Explanations of Black Box Decision Systems

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    The recent years have witnessed the rise of accurate but obscure decision systems which hide the logic of their internal decision processes to the users. The lack of explanations for the decisions of black box systems is a key ethical issue, and a limitation to the adoption of machine learning components in socially sensitive and safety-critical contexts. %Therefore, we need explanations that reveals the reasons why a predictor takes a certain decision. In this paper we focus on the problem of black box outcome explanation, i.e., explaining the reasons of the decision taken on a specific instance. We propose LORE, an agnostic method able to provide interpretable and faithful explanations. LORE first leans a local interpretable predictor on a synthetic neighborhood generated by a genetic algorithm. Then it derives from the logic of the local interpretable predictor a meaningful explanation consisting of: a decision rule, which explains the reasons of the decision; and a set of counterfactual rules, suggesting the changes in the instance's features that lead to a different outcome. Wide experiments show that LORE outperforms existing methods and baselines both in the quality of explanations and in the accuracy in mimicking the black box

    The Intuitive Appeal of Explainable Machines

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    Algorithmic decision-making has become synonymous with inexplicable decision-making, but what makes algorithms so difficult to explain? This Article examines what sets machine learning apart from other ways of developing rules for decision-making and the problem these properties pose for explanation. We show that machine learning models can be both inscrutable and nonintuitive and that these are related, but distinct, properties. Calls for explanation have treated these problems as one and the same, but disentangling the two reveals that they demand very different responses. Dealing with inscrutability requires providing a sensible description of the rules; addressing nonintuitiveness requires providing a satisfying explanation for why the rules are what they are. Existing laws like the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as techniques within machine learning, are focused almost entirely on the problem of inscrutability. While such techniques could allow a machine learning system to comply with existing law, doing so may not help if the goal is to assess whether the basis for decision-making is normatively defensible. In most cases, intuition serves as the unacknowledged bridge between a descriptive account and a normative evaluation. But because machine learning is often valued for its ability to uncover statistical relationships that defy intuition, relying on intuition is not a satisfying approach. This Article thus argues for other mechanisms for normative evaluation. To know why the rules are what they are, one must seek explanations of the process behind a model’s development, not just explanations of the model itself
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