Understanding Disparities in Post Hoc Machine Learning Explanation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Mhasawade, Vishwali, Rahman, Salman, Haskell-Craig, Zoe, Chunara, Rumi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Mhasawade, Vishwali
Rahman, Salman
Haskell-Craig, Zoe
Chunara, Rumi
author_facet Mhasawade, Vishwali
Rahman, Salman
Haskell-Craig, Zoe
Chunara, Rumi
contents Previous work has highlighted that existing post-hoc explanation methods exhibit disparities in explanation fidelity (across 'race' and 'gender' as sensitive attributes), and while a large body of work focuses on mitigating these issues at the explanation metric level, the role of the data generating process and black box model in relation to explanation disparities remains largely unexplored. Accordingly, through both simulations as well as experiments on a real-world dataset, we specifically assess challenges to explanation disparities that originate from properties of the data: limited sample size, covariate shift, concept shift, omitted variable bias, and challenges based on model properties: inclusion of the sensitive attribute and appropriate functional form. Through controlled simulation analyses, our study demonstrates that increased covariate shift, concept shift, and omission of covariates increase explanation disparities, with the effect pronounced higher for neural network models that are better able to capture the underlying functional form in comparison to linear models. We also observe consistent findings regarding the effect of concept shift and omitted variable bias on explanation disparities in the Adult income dataset. Overall, results indicate that disparities in model explanations can also depend on data and model properties. Based on this systematic investigation, we provide recommendations for the design of explanation methods that mitigate undesirable disparities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_14539
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding Disparities in Post Hoc Machine Learning Explanation
Mhasawade, Vishwali
Rahman, Salman
Haskell-Craig, Zoe
Chunara, Rumi
Machine Learning
Computers and Society
Previous work has highlighted that existing post-hoc explanation methods exhibit disparities in explanation fidelity (across 'race' and 'gender' as sensitive attributes), and while a large body of work focuses on mitigating these issues at the explanation metric level, the role of the data generating process and black box model in relation to explanation disparities remains largely unexplored. Accordingly, through both simulations as well as experiments on a real-world dataset, we specifically assess challenges to explanation disparities that originate from properties of the data: limited sample size, covariate shift, concept shift, omitted variable bias, and challenges based on model properties: inclusion of the sensitive attribute and appropriate functional form. Through controlled simulation analyses, our study demonstrates that increased covariate shift, concept shift, and omission of covariates increase explanation disparities, with the effect pronounced higher for neural network models that are better able to capture the underlying functional form in comparison to linear models. We also observe consistent findings regarding the effect of concept shift and omitted variable bias on explanation disparities in the Adult income dataset. Overall, results indicate that disparities in model explanations can also depend on data and model properties. Based on this systematic investigation, we provide recommendations for the design of explanation methods that mitigate undesirable disparities.
title Understanding Disparities in Post Hoc Machine Learning Explanation
topic Machine Learning
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.14539