Beyond Linear Surrogates: High-Fidelity Local Explanations for Black-Box Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shrestha, Sanjeev, Dubey, Rahul, Liu, Hui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shrestha, Sanjeev
Dubey, Rahul
Liu, Hui
author_facet Shrestha, Sanjeev
Dubey, Rahul
Liu, Hui
contents With the increasing complexity of black-box machine learning models and their adoption in high-stakes areas, it is critical to provide explanations for their predictions. Existing local explanation methods lack in generating high-fidelity explanations. This paper proposes a novel local model agnostic explanation method to generate high-fidelity explanations using multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) and N-ball sampling strategies. MARS is used to model non-linear local boundaries that effectively captures the underlying behavior of the reference model, thereby enhancing the local fidelity. The N-ball sampling technique samples perturbed samples directly from a desired distribution instead of reweighting, leading to further improvement in the faithfulness. The performance of the proposed method was computed in terms of root mean squared error (RMSE) and evaluated on five different benchmark datasets with different kernel width. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves higher local surrogate fidelity compared to baseline local explanation methods, with an average reduction of 32% in root mean square error, indicating more accurate local approximations of the black-box model. Additionally, statistical analysis shows that across all benchmark datasets, the proposed approach results were statistically significantly better. This paper advances the field of explainable AI by providing insights that can benefit the broader research and practitioner community.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_05556
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Linear Surrogates: High-Fidelity Local Explanations for Black-Box Models
Shrestha, Sanjeev
Dubey, Rahul
Liu, Hui
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
With the increasing complexity of black-box machine learning models and their adoption in high-stakes areas, it is critical to provide explanations for their predictions. Existing local explanation methods lack in generating high-fidelity explanations. This paper proposes a novel local model agnostic explanation method to generate high-fidelity explanations using multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) and N-ball sampling strategies. MARS is used to model non-linear local boundaries that effectively captures the underlying behavior of the reference model, thereby enhancing the local fidelity. The N-ball sampling technique samples perturbed samples directly from a desired distribution instead of reweighting, leading to further improvement in the faithfulness. The performance of the proposed method was computed in terms of root mean squared error (RMSE) and evaluated on five different benchmark datasets with different kernel width. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves higher local surrogate fidelity compared to baseline local explanation methods, with an average reduction of 32% in root mean square error, indicating more accurate local approximations of the black-box model. Additionally, statistical analysis shows that across all benchmark datasets, the proposed approach results were statistically significantly better. This paper advances the field of explainable AI by providing insights that can benefit the broader research and practitioner community.
title Beyond Linear Surrogates: High-Fidelity Local Explanations for Black-Box Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05556