Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Conti, Eddie, Parafita, Álvaro, Brando, Axel
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15371
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866908692976238592
author Conti, Eddie
Parafita, Álvaro
Brando, Axel
author_facet Conti, Eddie
Parafita, Álvaro
Brando, Axel
contents Assessing the importance of individual features in Machine Learning is critical to understand the model's decision-making process. While numerous methods exist, the lack of a definitive ground truth for comparison highlights the need for alternative, well-founded measures. This paper introduces a novel post-hoc local feature importance method called Counterfactual Importance Distribution (CID). We generate two sets of positive and negative counterfactuals, model their distributions using Kernel Density Estimation, and rank features based on a distributional dissimilarity measure. This measure, grounded in a rigorous mathematical framework, satisfies key properties required to function as a valid metric. We showcase the effectiveness of our method by comparing with well-established local feature importance explainers. Our method not only offers complementary perspectives to existing approaches, but also improves performance on faithfulness metrics (both for comprehensiveness and sufficiency), resulting in more faithful explanations of the system. These results highlight its potential as a valuable tool for model analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_15371
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CID: Measuring Feature Importance Through Counterfactual Distributions
Conti, Eddie
Parafita, Álvaro
Brando, Axel
Machine Learning
Assessing the importance of individual features in Machine Learning is critical to understand the model's decision-making process. While numerous methods exist, the lack of a definitive ground truth for comparison highlights the need for alternative, well-founded measures. This paper introduces a novel post-hoc local feature importance method called Counterfactual Importance Distribution (CID). We generate two sets of positive and negative counterfactuals, model their distributions using Kernel Density Estimation, and rank features based on a distributional dissimilarity measure. This measure, grounded in a rigorous mathematical framework, satisfies key properties required to function as a valid metric. We showcase the effectiveness of our method by comparing with well-established local feature importance explainers. Our method not only offers complementary perspectives to existing approaches, but also improves performance on faithfulness metrics (both for comprehensiveness and sufficiency), resulting in more faithful explanations of the system. These results highlight its potential as a valuable tool for model analysis.
title CID: Measuring Feature Importance Through Counterfactual Distributions
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15371