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Related papers: Simulating counterfactuals

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Counterfactual fairness is an approach to AI fairness that tries to make decisions based on the outcomes that an individual with some kind of sensitive status would have had without this status. This paper proposes Double Machine Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-22 Patrick Rehill

Work in Counterfactual Explanations tends to focus on the principle of "the closest possible world" that identifies small changes leading to the desired outcome. In this paper we argue that while this approach might initially seem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Rafael Poyiadzi , Kacper Sokol , Raul Santos-Rodriguez , Tijl De Bie , Peter Flach

There are now many explainable AI methods for understanding the decisions of a machine learning model. Among these are those based on counterfactual reasoning, which involve simulating features changes and observing the impact on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Vincent Lemaire , Nathan Le Boudec , Victor Guyomard , Françoise Fessant

Clustering algorithms rely on complex optimisation processes that may be difficult to comprehend, especially for individuals who lack technical expertise. While many explainable artificial intelligence techniques exist for supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-20 Aurora Spagnol , Kacper Sokol , Pietro Barbiero , Marc Langheinrich , Martin Gjoreski

The growing integration of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models into high-stakes domains such as healthcare and scientific research calls for models that are not only accurate but also interpretable. Among the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Zhuo Cao , Xuan Zhao , Lena Krieger , Hanno Scharr , Ira Assent

Counterfactuals operationalised through algorithmic recourse have become a powerful tool to make artificial intelligence systems explainable. Conceptually, given an individual classified as y -- the factual -- we seek actions such that…

Counterfactuals are a concept inherited from the field of logic and in general attain to the existence of causal relations between sentences or events. In particular, this concept has been introduced also in the context of interpretability…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-23 Pierluigi Francesco De Paola , Jared Miller , Alessandro Borri , Alessia Paglialonga , Fabrizio Dabbene

In high-stake domains such as healthcare and hiring, the role of machine learning (ML) in decision-making raises significant fairness concerns. This work focuses on Counterfactual Fairness (CF), which posits that an ML model's outcome on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Zeyu Zhou , Tianci Liu , Ruqi Bai , Jing Gao , Murat Kocaoglu , David I. Inouye

Counterfactual frameworks have grown popular in machine learning for both explaining algorithmic decisions but also defining individual notions of fairness, more intuitive than typical group fairness conditions. However, state-of-the-art…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-09 Lucas de Lara , Alberto González-Sanz , Nicholas Asher , Laurent Risser , Jean-Michel Loubes

Counterfactual explanations is one of the post-hoc methods used to provide explainability to machine learning models that have been attracting attention in recent years. Most examples in the literature, address the problem of generating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Guillermo Navas-Palencia

A major challenge in estimating treatment effects in observational studies is the reliance on untestable conditions such as the assumption of no unmeasured confounding. In this work, we propose an algorithm that can falsify the assumption…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-03 Rickard K. A. Karlsson , Jesse H. Krijthe

We propose nonparametric identification and semiparametric estimation of joint potential outcome distributions in the presence of confounding. First, in settings with observed confounding, we derive tighter, covariate-informed bounds on the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-19 Jianle Sun , Kun Zhang

This paper investigates the problem of bounding counterfactual queries from an arbitrary collection of observational and experimental distributions and qualitative knowledge about the underlying data-generating model represented in the form…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-13 Junzhe Zhang , Jin Tian , Elias Bareinboim

The fundamental problem of causal inference - that the counterfactual outcome for any individual is never observed - has shaped the entire methodology of the field. Every existing approach substitutes assumptions for missing data:…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Olav Laudy

The use of counterfactuals for considerations of algorithmic fairness and explainability is gaining prominence within the machine learning community and industry. This paper argues for more caution with the use of counterfactuals when the…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Atoosa Kasirzadeh , Andrew Smart

Counterfactual reasoning -- envisioning hypothetical scenarios, or possible worlds, where some circumstances are different from what (f)actually occurred (counter-to-fact) -- is ubiquitous in human cognition. Conventionally,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Julius von Kügelgen , Abdirisak Mohamed , Sander Beckers

It is commonly believed that, in a real-world environment, samples can only be drawn from observational and interventional distributions, corresponding to Layers 1 and 2 of the Pearl Causal Hierarchy. Layer 3, representing counterfactual…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Arvind Raghavan , Elias Bareinboim

In the environment of fair lending laws and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the ability to explain a model's prediction is of paramount importance. High quality explanations are the first step in assessing fairness.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Rachana Balasubramanian , Samuel Sharpe , Brian Barr , Jason Wittenbach , C. Bayan Bruss

We mathematically axiomatise the stochastics of counterfactuals, by introducing two related frameworks, called counterfactual probability spaces and counterfactual causal spaces, which we collectively term counterfactual spaces. They are,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-05 Junhyung Park , Fanny Yang , Thomas Icard

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Zhiqun Zuo , Tian Xie , Xuwei Tan , Xueru Zhang , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili