Practical do-Shapley Explanations with Estimand-Agnostic Causal Inference
Abstract
Among explainability techniques, SHAP stands out as one of the most popular, but often overlooks the causal structure of the problem. In response, do-SHAP employs interventional queries, but its reliance on estimands hinders its practical application. To address this problem, we propose the use of estimand-agnostic approaches, which allow for the estimation of any identifiable query from a single model, making do-SHAP feasible on complex graphs. We also develop a novel algorithm to significantly accelerate its computation at a negligible cost, as well as a method to explain inaccessible Data Generating Processes. We demonstrate the estimation and computational performance of our approach, and validate it on two real-world datasets, highlighting its potential in obtaining reliable explanations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.20211,
title = {Practical do-Shapley Explanations with Estimand-Agnostic Causal Inference},
author = {Álvaro Parafita and Tomas Garriga and Axel Brando and Francisco J. Cazorla},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.20211},
year = {2026}
}
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Published at NeurIPS 2025