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Variable importance measures (VIMs) aim to quantify the contribution of each input covariate to the predictability of a given output. With the growing interest in explainable AI, numerous VIMs have been proposed, many of which are heuristic…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-23 Angel Reyero-Lobo , Pierre Neuvial , Bertrand Thirion

In the era of "big data", it is becoming more of a challenge to not only build state-of-the-art predictive models, but also gain an understanding of what's really going on in the data. For example, it is often of interest to know which, if…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-15 Brandon M. Greenwell , Bradley C. Boehmke , Andrew J. McCarthy

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-24 Tien-En Chang , Argon Chen

Classifier specific (CS) and classifier agnostic (CA) feature importance methods are widely used (often interchangeably) by prior studies to derive feature importance ranks from a defect classifier. However, different feature importance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur , Shaowei Wang , Yasutaka Kamei , Ahmed E. Hassan

A measure of relative importance of variables is often desired by researchers when the explanatory aspects of econometric methods are of interest. To this end, the author briefly reviews the limitations of conventional econometrics in…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-08-25 Akash Malhotra

While achieving high prediction accuracy is a fundamental goal in machine learning, an equally important task is finding a small number of features with high explanatory power. One popular selection technique is permutation importance,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-02 Min Lu , Hemant Ishwaran

Given a collection of features available for inclusion in a predictive model, it may be of interest to quantify the relative importance of a subset of features for the prediction task at hand. For example, in HIV vaccine trials, participant…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-27 Charles J. Wolock , Peter B. Gilbert , Noah Simon , Marco Carone

In recent years, a large amount of model-agnostic methods to improve the transparency, trustability and interpretability of machine learning models have been developed. We introduce local feature importance as a local version of a recent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-15 Giuseppe Casalicchio , Christoph Molnar , Bernd Bischl

Reliable estimation of feature contributions in machine learning models is essential for trust, transparency and regulatory compliance, especially when models are proprietary or otherwise operate as black boxes. While permutation-based…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-24 Albert Dorador

For complex latent variable models, the likelihood function is not available in closed form. In this context, a popular method to perform parameter estimation is Importance Weighted Variational Inference. It essentially maximizes the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-01-16 Badr-Eddine Cherief-Abdellatif , Randal Douc , Arnaud Doucet , Hugo Marival

We introduce a variable importance measure to quantify the impact of individual input variables to a black box function. Our measure is based on the Shapley value from cooperative game theory. Many measures of variable importance operate by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-05 Masayoshi Mase , Art B. Owen , Benjamin Seiler

One of the key elements of explanatory analysis of a predictive model is to assess the importance of individual variables. Rapid development of the area of predictive model exploration (also called explainable artificial intelligence or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Katarzyna Pekala , Katarzyna Woznica , Przemyslaw Biecek

Variable importance is central to scientific studies, including the social sciences and causal inference, healthcare, and other domains. However, current notions of variable importance are often tied to a specific predictive model. This is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-11 Jiayun Dong , Cynthia Rudin

Variable importance is defined as a measure of each regressor's contribution to model fit. Using R^2 as the fit criterion in linear models leads to the Shapley value (LMG) and proportionate value (PMVD) as variable importance measures.…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-12-08 Charles D. Coleman

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Jörg Martin , Stefan Haufe

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-13 Joris Pries , Guus Berkelmans , Sandjai Bhulai , Rob van der Mei

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-17 Jin-Hong Du , Kathryn Roeder , Larry Wasserman

Variable importance is one of the most widely used measures for interpreting machine learning with significant interest from both statistics and machine learning communities. Recently, increasing attention has been directed toward…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-22 Xiaohan Wang , Yunzhe Zhou , Giles Hooker

Model interpretability is one of the most intriguing problems in most of the Machine Learning models, particularly for those that are mathematically sophisticated. Computing Shapley Values are arguably the best approach so far to find the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-15 Indranil Basu , Subhadip Maji

Exposure assessment is fundamental to air pollution cohort studies. The objective is to predict air pollution exposures for study subjects at locations without data in order to optimize our ability to learn about health effects of air…

Applications · Statistics 2024-06-05 Si Cheng , Magali N. Blanco , Lianne Sheppard , Ali Shojaie , Adam Szpiro