Global Sensitivity Analysis for Engineering Design Based on Individual Conditional Expectations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Palar, Pramudita Satria, Saves, Paul, Regis, Rommel G., Shimoyama, Koji, Obayashi, Shigeru, Verstaevel, Nicolas, Morlier, Joseph
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Palar, Pramudita Satria
Saves, Paul
Regis, Rommel G.
Shimoyama, Koji
Obayashi, Shigeru
Verstaevel, Nicolas
Morlier, Joseph
author_facet Palar, Pramudita Satria
Saves, Paul
Regis, Rommel G.
Shimoyama, Koji
Obayashi, Shigeru
Verstaevel, Nicolas
Morlier, Joseph
contents Explainable machine learning techniques have gained increasing attention in engineering applications, especially in aerospace design and analysis, where understanding how input variables influence data-driven models is essential. Partial Dependence Plots (PDPs) are widely used for interpreting black-box models by showing the average effect of an input variable on the prediction. However, their global sensitivity metric can be misleading when strong interactions are present, as averaging tends to obscure interaction effects. To address this limitation, we propose a global sensitivity metric based on Individual Conditional Expectation (ICE) curves. The method computes the expected feature importance across ICE curves, along with their standard deviation, to more effectively capture the influence of interactions. We provide a mathematical proof demonstrating that the PDP-based sensitivity is a lower bound of the proposed ICE-based metric under truncated orthogonal polynomial expansion. In addition, we introduce an ICE-based correlation value to quantify how interactions modify the relationship between inputs and the output. Comparative evaluations were performed on three cases: a 5-variable analytical function, a 5-variable wind-turbine fatigue problem, and a 9-variable airfoil aerodynamics case, where ICE-based sensitivity was benchmarked against PDP, SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), and Sobol' indices. The results show that ICE-based feature importance provides richer insights than the traditional PDP-based approach, while visual interpretations from PDP, ICE, and SHAP complement one another by offering multiple perspectives.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_11946
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Global Sensitivity Analysis for Engineering Design Based on Individual Conditional Expectations
Palar, Pramudita Satria
Saves, Paul
Regis, Rommel G.
Shimoyama, Koji
Obayashi, Shigeru
Verstaevel, Nicolas
Morlier, Joseph
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Explainable machine learning techniques have gained increasing attention in engineering applications, especially in aerospace design and analysis, where understanding how input variables influence data-driven models is essential. Partial Dependence Plots (PDPs) are widely used for interpreting black-box models by showing the average effect of an input variable on the prediction. However, their global sensitivity metric can be misleading when strong interactions are present, as averaging tends to obscure interaction effects. To address this limitation, we propose a global sensitivity metric based on Individual Conditional Expectation (ICE) curves. The method computes the expected feature importance across ICE curves, along with their standard deviation, to more effectively capture the influence of interactions. We provide a mathematical proof demonstrating that the PDP-based sensitivity is a lower bound of the proposed ICE-based metric under truncated orthogonal polynomial expansion. In addition, we introduce an ICE-based correlation value to quantify how interactions modify the relationship between inputs and the output. Comparative evaluations were performed on three cases: a 5-variable analytical function, a 5-variable wind-turbine fatigue problem, and a 9-variable airfoil aerodynamics case, where ICE-based sensitivity was benchmarked against PDP, SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), and Sobol' indices. The results show that ICE-based feature importance provides richer insights than the traditional PDP-based approach, while visual interpretations from PDP, ICE, and SHAP complement one another by offering multiple perspectives.
title Global Sensitivity Analysis for Engineering Design Based on Individual Conditional Expectations
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11946