Model-agnostic variable importance for predictive uncertainty: an entropy-based approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Wood, Danny, Papamarkou, Theodore, Benatan, Matt, Allmendinger, Richard
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Wood, Danny
Papamarkou, Theodore
Benatan, Matt
Allmendinger, Richard
author_facet Wood, Danny
Papamarkou, Theodore
Benatan, Matt
Allmendinger, Richard
contents In order to trust the predictions of a machine learning algorithm, it is necessary to understand the factors that contribute to those predictions. In the case of probabilistic and uncertainty-aware models, it is necessary to understand not only the reasons for the predictions themselves, but also the reasons for the model's level of confidence in those predictions. In this paper, we show how existing methods in explainability can be extended to uncertainty-aware models and how such extensions can be used to understand the sources of uncertainty in a model's predictive distribution. In particular, by adapting permutation feature importance, partial dependence plots, and individual conditional expectation plots, we demonstrate that novel insights into model behaviour may be obtained and that these methods can be used to measure the impact of features on both the entropy of the predictive distribution and the log-likelihood of the ground truth labels under that distribution. With experiments using both synthetic and real-world data, we demonstrate the utility of these approaches to understand both the sources of uncertainty and their impact on model performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_12842
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Model-agnostic variable importance for predictive uncertainty: an entropy-based approach
Wood, Danny
Papamarkou, Theodore
Benatan, Matt
Allmendinger, Richard
Machine Learning
In order to trust the predictions of a machine learning algorithm, it is necessary to understand the factors that contribute to those predictions. In the case of probabilistic and uncertainty-aware models, it is necessary to understand not only the reasons for the predictions themselves, but also the reasons for the model's level of confidence in those predictions. In this paper, we show how existing methods in explainability can be extended to uncertainty-aware models and how such extensions can be used to understand the sources of uncertainty in a model's predictive distribution. In particular, by adapting permutation feature importance, partial dependence plots, and individual conditional expectation plots, we demonstrate that novel insights into model behaviour may be obtained and that these methods can be used to measure the impact of features on both the entropy of the predictive distribution and the log-likelihood of the ground truth labels under that distribution. With experiments using both synthetic and real-world data, we demonstrate the utility of these approaches to understand both the sources of uncertainty and their impact on model performance.
title Model-agnostic variable importance for predictive uncertainty: an entropy-based approach
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.12842