Toward Understanding the Disagreement Problem in Neural Network Feature Attribution

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Koenen, Niklas, Wright, Marvin N.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Koenen, Niklas
Wright, Marvin N.
author_facet Koenen, Niklas
Wright, Marvin N.
contents In recent years, neural networks have demonstrated their remarkable ability to discern intricate patterns and relationships from raw data. However, understanding the inner workings of these black box models remains challenging, yet crucial for high-stake decisions. Among the prominent approaches for explaining these black boxes are feature attribution methods, which assign relevance or contribution scores to each input variable for a model prediction. Despite the plethora of proposed techniques, ranging from gradient-based to backpropagation-based methods, a significant debate persists about which method to use. Various evaluation metrics have been proposed to assess the trustworthiness or robustness of their results. However, current research highlights disagreement among state-of-the-art methods in their explanations. Our work addresses this confusion by investigating the explanations' fundamental and distributional behavior. Additionally, through a comprehensive simulation study, we illustrate the impact of common scaling and encoding techniques on the explanation quality, assess their efficacy across different effect sizes, and demonstrate the origin of inconsistency in rank-based evaluation metrics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_11330
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Toward Understanding the Disagreement Problem in Neural Network Feature Attribution
Koenen, Niklas
Wright, Marvin N.
Machine Learning
In recent years, neural networks have demonstrated their remarkable ability to discern intricate patterns and relationships from raw data. However, understanding the inner workings of these black box models remains challenging, yet crucial for high-stake decisions. Among the prominent approaches for explaining these black boxes are feature attribution methods, which assign relevance or contribution scores to each input variable for a model prediction. Despite the plethora of proposed techniques, ranging from gradient-based to backpropagation-based methods, a significant debate persists about which method to use. Various evaluation metrics have been proposed to assess the trustworthiness or robustness of their results. However, current research highlights disagreement among state-of-the-art methods in their explanations. Our work addresses this confusion by investigating the explanations' fundamental and distributional behavior. Additionally, through a comprehensive simulation study, we illustrate the impact of common scaling and encoding techniques on the explanation quality, assess their efficacy across different effect sizes, and demonstrate the origin of inconsistency in rank-based evaluation metrics.
title Toward Understanding the Disagreement Problem in Neural Network Feature Attribution
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11330