Related papers: Relative Feature Importance
Complex problems may require sophisticated, non-linear learning methods such as kernel machines or deep neural networks to achieve state of the art prediction accuracies. However, high prediction accuracies are not the only objective to…
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has mainly focused on static learning scenarios so far. We are interested in dynamic scenarios where data is sampled progressively, and learning is done in an incremental rather than a batch mode.…
While machine learning (ML) models are increasingly used due to their high predictive power, their use in understanding the data-generating process (DGP) is limited. Understanding the DGP requires insights into feature-target associations,…
Over the past few years, the use of machine learning models has emerged as a generic and powerful means for prediction purposes. At the same time, there is a growing demand for interpretability of prediction models. To determine which…
Most accurate predictions are typically obtained by learning machines with complex feature spaces (as e.g. induced by kernels). Unfortunately, such decision rules are hardly accessible to humans and cannot easily be used to gain insights…
Conditional Feature Importance (CFI) is a classical variable importance measure that accounts for the relationship between the studied feature and the others. However, CFI has not yet been studied from a theoretical perspective because the…
The interpretation of feature importance in machine learning models is challenging when features are dependent. Permutation feature importance (PFI) ignores such dependencies, which can cause misleading interpretations due to extrapolation.…
We introduce xplainfi, an R package built on top of the mlr3 ecosystem for global, loss-based feature importance methods for machine learning models. Various feature importance methods exist in R, but significant gaps remain, particularly…
Scientists frequently prioritize learning from data rather than training the best possible model; however, research in machine learning often prioritizes the latter. Marginal contribution feature importance (MCI) was developed to break this…
When used in the context of decision theory, feature importance expresses how much changing the value of a feature can change the model outcome (or the utility of the outcome), compared to other features. Feature importance should not be…
Have you ever wondered how your feature space is impacting the prediction of a specific sample in your dataset? In this paper, we introduce Single Sample Feature Importance (SSFI), which is an interpretable feature importance algorithm that…
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…
This paper introduces a novel perspective about error in machine learning and proposes inverse feature learning (IFL) as a representation learning approach that learns a set of high-level features based on the representation of error for…
Functionality or proxy-based approach is one of the used approaches to evaluate the quality of explainable artificial intelligence methods. It uses statistical methods, definitions and new developed metrics for the evaluation without human…
Interpretation of deep learning models is a very challenging problem because of their large number of parameters, complex connections between nodes, and unintelligible feature representations. Despite this, many view interpretability as a…
Variable importance plays a pivotal role in interpretable machine learning as it helps measure the impact of factors on the output of the prediction model. Model agnostic methods based on the generation of "null" features via permutation…
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…
Variable importance assessment has become a crucial step in machine-learning applications when using complex learners, such as deep neural networks, on large-scale data. Removal-based importance assessment is currently the reference…
Interpretability is an important area of research for safe deployment of machine learning systems. One particular type of interpretability method attributes model decisions to input features. Despite active development, quantitative…
Feature importance (FI) measures are widely used to assess the contributions of predictors to an outcome, but they may target different notions of relevance. When predictors are correlated, traditional statistical FI methods are often…