An Explainable Gaussian Process Auto-encoder for Tabular Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Wei, Barr, Brian, Paisley, John
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zhang, Wei
Barr, Brian
Paisley, John
author_facet Zhang, Wei
Barr, Brian
Paisley, John
contents Explainable machine learning has attracted much interest in the community where the stakes are high. Counterfactual explanations methods have become an important tool in explaining a black-box model. The recent advances have leveraged the power of generative models such as an autoencoder. In this paper, we propose a novel method using a Gaussian process to construct the auto-encoder architecture for generating counterfactual samples. The resulting model requires fewer learnable parameters and thus is less prone to overfitting. We also introduce a novel density estimator that allows for searching for in-distribution samples. Furthermore, we introduce an algorithm for selecting the optimal regularization rate on density estimator while searching for counterfactuals. We experiment with our method in several large-scale tabular datasets and compare with other auto-encoder-based methods. The results show that our method is capable of generating diversified and in-distribution counterfactual samples.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_00884
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Explainable Gaussian Process Auto-encoder for Tabular Data
Zhang, Wei
Barr, Brian
Paisley, John
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Explainable machine learning has attracted much interest in the community where the stakes are high. Counterfactual explanations methods have become an important tool in explaining a black-box model. The recent advances have leveraged the power of generative models such as an autoencoder. In this paper, we propose a novel method using a Gaussian process to construct the auto-encoder architecture for generating counterfactual samples. The resulting model requires fewer learnable parameters and thus is less prone to overfitting. We also introduce a novel density estimator that allows for searching for in-distribution samples. Furthermore, we introduce an algorithm for selecting the optimal regularization rate on density estimator while searching for counterfactuals. We experiment with our method in several large-scale tabular datasets and compare with other auto-encoder-based methods. The results show that our method is capable of generating diversified and in-distribution counterfactual samples.
title An Explainable Gaussian Process Auto-encoder for Tabular Data
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00884