Related papers: Nonparametric Feature Impact and Importance
In machine learning practice it is often useful to identify relevant input features. Isolating key input elements, ranked according their respective degree of relevance, can help to elaborate on the process of decision making. Here, we…
We propose an empirical measure of the approximate accuracy of feature importance estimates in deep neural networks. Our results across several large-scale image classification datasets show that many popular interpretability methods…
In domains where transparency and trustworthiness are crucial, such as healthcare, rule-based systems are widely used and often preferred over black-box models for decision support systems due to their inherent interpretability. However, as…
Nonparametric feature selection in high-dimensional data is an important and challenging problem in statistics and machine learning fields. Most of the existing methods for feature selection focus on parametric or additive models which may…
Feature selection is one of the most relevant processes in any methodology for creating a statistical learning model. Usually, existing algorithms establish some criterion to select the most influential variables, discarding those that do…
A dataset has been classified by some unknown classifier into two types of points. What were the most important factors in determining the classification outcome? In this work, we employ an axiomatic approach in order to uniquely…
Feature selection plays an important role in the data mining process. It is needed to deal with the excessive number of features, which can become a computational burden on the learning algorithms. It is also necessary, even when…
We provide an inferential framework to assess variable importance for heterogeneous treatment effects. This assessment is especially useful in high-risk domains such as medicine, where decision makers hesitate to rely on black-box treatment…
Inferring a decision maker's utility function typically involves an elicitation phase where the decision maker responds to a series of elicitation queries, followed by an estimation phase where the state-of-the-art is to either fit the…
Understanding the influence of features in machine learning is crucial to interpreting models and selecting the best features for classification. In this work we propose the use of principles from coalitional game theory to reason about…
The recent paper by Byrd & Lipton (2019), based on empirical observations, raises a major concern on the impact of importance weighting for the over-parameterized deep learning models. They observe that as long as the model can separate the…
With increasing reliance on the outcomes of black-box models in critical applications, post-hoc explainability tools that do not require access to the model internals are often used to enable humans understand and trust these models. In…
Selecting a minimal feature set that is maximally informative about a target variable is a central task in machine learning and statistics. Information theory provides a powerful framework for formulating feature selection algorithms --…
Although conceptually related, variable selection and relative importance (RI) analysis have been treated quite differently in the literature. While RI is typically used for post-hoc model explanation, this paper explores its potential for…
Existing tests for factorial designs in the nonparametric case are based on hypotheses formulated in terms of distribution functions. Typical null hypotheses, however, are formulated in terms of some parameters or effect measures,…
With the widespread use of machine learning to support decision-making, it is increasingly important to verify and understand the reasons why a particular output is produced. Although post-training feature importance approaches assist this…
Importance sampling is widely used in machine learning and statistics, but its power is limited by the restriction of using simple proposals for which the importance weights can be tractably calculated. We address this problem by studying…
Despite the popularity of feature importance (FI) measures in interpretable machine learning, the statistical adequacy of these methods is rarely discussed. From a statistical perspective, a major distinction is between analyzing a…
In many real-world machine learning problems, feature values are not readily available. To make predictions, some of the missing features have to be acquired, which can incur a cost in money, computational time, or human time, depending on…
We consider the problem of regression with selectively observed covariates in a nonparametric framework. Our approach relies on instrumental variables that explain variation in the latent covariates but have no direct effect on selection.…