Related papers: Transport-based Counterfactual Models
Perhaps the most prominent current definition of (actual) causality is due to Halpern and Pearl. It is defined using causal models (also known as structural equations models). We abstract the definition, extracting its key features, so that…
The importance of algorithmic fairness grows with the increasing impact machine learning has on people's lives. Recent work on fairness metrics shows the need for causal reasoning in fairness constraints. In this work, a practical method…
Counterfactual fairness requires that a person would have been classified in the same way by an AI or other algorithmic system if they had a different protected class, such as a different race or gender. This is an intuitive standard, as…
In this paper we propose a causal modeling approach to intersectional fairness, and a flexible, task-specific method for computing intersectionally fair rankings. Rankings are used in many contexts, ranging from Web search results to…
With the increasing impact of algorithmic decision-making on human lives, the interpretability of models has become a critical issue in machine learning. Counterfactual explanation is an important method in the field of interpretable…
Despite their enormous predictive power, machine learning models are often unsuitable for applications in regulated industries such as finance, due to their limited capacity to provide explanations. While model-agnostic frameworks such as…
As machine learning (ML) algorithms are used in applications that involve humans, concerns have arisen that these algorithms may be biased against certain social groups. \textit{Counterfactual fairness} (CF) is a fairness notion proposed in…
We offer a graphical interpretation of unfairness in a dataset as the presence of an unfair causal path in the causal Bayesian network representing the data-generation mechanism. We use this viewpoint to revisit the recent debate…
Machine learning algorithms can produce biased outcome/prediction, typically, against minorities and under-represented sub-populations. Therefore, fairness is emerging as an important requirement for the large scale application of machine…
Understanding predictions made by deep neural networks is notoriously difficult, but also crucial to their dissemination. As all machine learning based methods, they are as good as their training data, and can also capture unwanted biases.…
We consider counterfactual explanations, the problem of minimally adjusting features in a source input instance so that it is classified as a target class under a given classifier. This has become a topic of recent interest as a way to…
Counterfactual explanations are a central tool in interpretable machine learning, yet computing them exactly for complex models remains challenging. For tree ensembles, predictions are piecewise constant over a large collection of…
To construct interpretable explanations that are consistent with the original ML model, counterfactual examples---showing how the model's output changes with small perturbations to the input---have been proposed. This paper extends the work…
While counterfactual fairness of point predictors is well studied, its extension to prediction sets--central to fair decision-making under uncertainty--remains underexplored. On the other hand, conformal prediction (CP) provides efficient,…
When applied in healthcare, reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to dynamically match the right interventions to subjects to maximize population benefit. However, the learned policy may disproportionately allocate efficacious actions to one…
Learning-based approaches, such as reinforcement and imitation learning are gaining popularity in decision-making for autonomous driving. However, learned policies often fail to generalize and cannot handle novel situations well. Asking and…
In (Beckers, 2025) I introduced nondeterministic causal models as a generalization of Pearl's standard deterministic causal models. I here take advantage of the increased expressivity offered by these models to offer a novel definition of…
Post-hoc explanations of machine learning models are crucial for people to understand and act on algorithmic predictions. An intriguing class of explanations is through counterfactuals, hypothetical examples that show people how to obtain a…
Interpretability research takes counterfactual theories of causality for granted. Most causal methods rely on counterfactual interventions to inputs or the activations of particular model components, followed by observations of the change…
Counterfactual explanations utilize feature perturbations to analyze the outcome of an original decision and recommend an actionable recourse. We argue that it is beneficial to provide several alternative explanations rather than a single…