Related papers: Ultra-marginal Feature Importance: Learning from D…
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 --…
Unsupervised feature selection (UFS) has recently gained attention for its effectiveness in processing unlabeled high-dimensional data. However, existing methods overlook the intrinsic causal mechanisms within the data, resulting in the…
Many recent methods for unsupervised or self-supervised representation learning train feature extractors by maximizing an estimate of the mutual information (MI) between different views of the data. This comes with several immediate…
Feature selection is an important problem in machine learning, which aims to select variables that lead to an optimal predictive model. In this paper, we focus on feature selection for post-intervention outcome prediction from…
Artificial intelligence models and methods commonly lack causal interpretability. Despite the advancements in interpretable machine learning (IML) methods, they frequently assign importance to features which lack causal influence on the…
How can we effectively remove or ''unlearn'' undesirable information, such as specific features or the influence of individual data points, from a learning outcome while minimizing utility loss and ensuring rigorous guarantees? We introduce…
Classical machine learning techniques often struggle with overfitting and unreliable predictions when exposed to novel conditions. Introducing causality into the modelling process offers a promising way to mitigate these challenges by…
Explainable artificial intelligence promises to yield insights into relevant features, thereby enabling humans to examine and scrutinize machine learning models or even facilitating scientific discovery. Considering the widespread technique…
Recent work on fairness in machine learning has focused on various statistical discrimination criteria and how they trade off. Most of these criteria are observational: They depend only on the joint distribution of predictor, protected…
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…
We propose the conditional predictive impact (CPI), a consistent and unbiased estimator of the association between one or several features and a given outcome, conditional on a reduced feature set. Building on the knockoff framework of…
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…
As machine learning models increasingly impact society, their opaque nature poses challenges to trust and accountability, particularly in fairness contexts. Understanding how individual features influence model outcomes is crucial for…
When machine learning supports decision-making in safety-critical systems, it is important to verify and understand the reasons why a particular output is produced. Although feature importance calculation approaches assist in…
The fairness of machine learning-based decisions has become an increasingly important focus in the design of supervised machine learning methods. Most fairness approaches optimize a specified trade-off between performance measure(s) (e.g.,…
Machine Learning explainability techniques have been proposed as a means of `explaining' or interrogating a model in order to understand why a particular decision or prediction has been made. Such an ability is especially important at a…
Random forest is a popular machine learning approach for the analysis of high-dimensional data because it is flexible and provides variable importance measures for the selection of relevant features. However, the complex relationships…
Algorithms in machine learning and AI do critically depend on at least three key components: (i) the risk function, which is the expectation of the loss function, (ii) the function space, which is often called the hypothesis space, and…
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…
This paper provides new theory to support to the eXplainable AI (XAI) method Contextual Importance and Utility (CIU). CIU arithmetic is based on the concepts of Multi-Attribute Utility Theory, which gives CIU a solid theoretical foundation.…