MCCE: Missingness-aware Causal Concept Explainer

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Gao, Jifan, Chen, Guanhua
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Gao, Jifan
Chen, Guanhua
author_facet Gao, Jifan
Chen, Guanhua
contents Causal concept effect estimation is gaining increasing interest in the field of interpretable machine learning. This general approach explains the behaviors of machine learning models by estimating the causal effect of human-understandable concepts, which represent high-level knowledge more comprehensibly than raw inputs like tokens. However, existing causal concept effect explanation methods assume complete observation of all concepts involved within the dataset, which can fail in practice due to incomplete annotations or missing concept data. We theoretically demonstrate that unobserved concepts can bias the estimation of the causal effects of observed concepts. To address this limitation, we introduce the Missingness-aware Causal Concept Explainer (MCCE), a novel framework specifically designed to estimate causal concept effects when not all concepts are observable. Our framework learns to account for residual bias resulting from missing concepts and utilizes a linear predictor to model the relationships between these concepts and the outputs of black-box machine learning models. It can offer explanations on both local and global levels. We conduct validations using a real-world dataset, demonstrating that MCCE achieves promising performance compared to state-of-the-art explanation methods in causal concept effect estimation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_09639
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MCCE: Missingness-aware Causal Concept Explainer
Gao, Jifan
Chen, Guanhua
Machine Learning
Causal concept effect estimation is gaining increasing interest in the field of interpretable machine learning. This general approach explains the behaviors of machine learning models by estimating the causal effect of human-understandable concepts, which represent high-level knowledge more comprehensibly than raw inputs like tokens. However, existing causal concept effect explanation methods assume complete observation of all concepts involved within the dataset, which can fail in practice due to incomplete annotations or missing concept data. We theoretically demonstrate that unobserved concepts can bias the estimation of the causal effects of observed concepts. To address this limitation, we introduce the Missingness-aware Causal Concept Explainer (MCCE), a novel framework specifically designed to estimate causal concept effects when not all concepts are observable. Our framework learns to account for residual bias resulting from missing concepts and utilizes a linear predictor to model the relationships between these concepts and the outputs of black-box machine learning models. It can offer explanations on both local and global levels. We conduct validations using a real-world dataset, demonstrating that MCCE achieves promising performance compared to state-of-the-art explanation methods in causal concept effect estimation.
title MCCE: Missingness-aware Causal Concept Explainer
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09639