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Main Authors: Törnblom, John, Karlsson, Emil, Nadjm-Tehrani, Simin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.09271
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author Törnblom, John
Karlsson, Emil
Nadjm-Tehrani, Simin
author_facet Törnblom, John
Karlsson, Emil
Nadjm-Tehrani, Simin
contents The ability to explain why a machine learning model arrives at a particular prediction is crucial when used as decision support by human operators of critical systems. The provided explanations must be provably correct, and preferably without redundant information, called minimal explanations. In this paper, we aim at finding explanations for predictions made by tree ensembles that are not only minimal, but also minimum with respect to a cost function. To this end, we first present a highly efficient oracle that can determine the correctness of explanations, surpassing the runtime performance of current state-of-the-art alternatives by several orders of magnitude when computing minimal explanations. Secondly, we adapt an algorithm called MARCO from related works (calling it m-MARCO) for the purpose of computing a single minimum explanation per prediction, and demonstrate an overall speedup factor of two compared to the MARCO algorithm which enumerates all minimal explanations. Finally, we study the obtained explanations from a range of use cases, leading to further insights of their characteristics. In particular, we observe that in several cases, there are more than 100,000 minimal explanations to choose from for a single prediction. In these cases, we see that only a small portion of the minimal explanations are also minimum, and that the minimum explanations are significantly less verbose, hence motivating the aim of this work.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2303_09271
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Finding Minimum-Cost Explanations for Predictions made by Tree Ensembles
Törnblom, John
Karlsson, Emil
Nadjm-Tehrani, Simin
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The ability to explain why a machine learning model arrives at a particular prediction is crucial when used as decision support by human operators of critical systems. The provided explanations must be provably correct, and preferably without redundant information, called minimal explanations. In this paper, we aim at finding explanations for predictions made by tree ensembles that are not only minimal, but also minimum with respect to a cost function. To this end, we first present a highly efficient oracle that can determine the correctness of explanations, surpassing the runtime performance of current state-of-the-art alternatives by several orders of magnitude when computing minimal explanations. Secondly, we adapt an algorithm called MARCO from related works (calling it m-MARCO) for the purpose of computing a single minimum explanation per prediction, and demonstrate an overall speedup factor of two compared to the MARCO algorithm which enumerates all minimal explanations. Finally, we study the obtained explanations from a range of use cases, leading to further insights of their characteristics. In particular, we observe that in several cases, there are more than 100,000 minimal explanations to choose from for a single prediction. In these cases, we see that only a small portion of the minimal explanations are also minimum, and that the minimum explanations are significantly less verbose, hence motivating the aim of this work.
title Finding Minimum-Cost Explanations for Predictions made by Tree Ensembles
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.09271