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Interpretable machine learning has become a very active area of research due to the rising popularity of machine learning algorithms and their inherently challenging interpretability. Most work in this area has been focused on the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-09 Quay Au , Julia Herbinger , Clemens Stachl , Bernd Bischl , Giuseppe Casalicchio

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-14 Divish Rengasamy , Benjamin Rothwell , Grazziela Figueredo

A shortcoming of black-box supervised learning models is their lack of interpretability or transparency. To facilitate interpretation, post-hoc global variable importance measures (VIMs) are widely used to assign to each predictor or input…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-25 Jingyu Zhu , Daniel W. Apley

Estimating the strength of dependency between two variables is fundamental for exploratory analysis and many other applications in data mining. For example: non-linear dependencies between two continuous variables can be explored with the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-01-21 Simone Romano , Nguyen Xuan Vinh , James Bailey , Karin Verspoor

Variable selection in high-dimensional scenarios is of great interested in statistics. One application involves identifying differentially expressed genes in genomic analysis. Existing methods for addressing this problem have some limits or…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-06-19 Liuhua Peng , Long Qu , Dan Nettleton

Causal machine learning holds promise for estimating individual treatment effects from complex data. For successful real-world applications of machine learning methods, it is of paramount importance to obtain reliable insights into which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Joseph Paillard , Angel Reyero Lobo , Vitaliy Kolodyazhniy , Bertrand Thirion , Denis A. Engemann

Understanding the contribution of individual features in predictive models remains a central goal in interpretable machine learning, and while many model-agnostic methods exist to estimate feature importance, they often fall short in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ivan Lazic , Chiara Barà , Marta Iovino , Sebastiano Stramaglia , Niksa Jakovljevic , Luca Faes

Variable selection, also known as feature selection in machine learning, plays an important role in modeling high dimensional data and is key to data-driven scientific discoveries. We consider here the problem of detecting influential…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-09-24 Bo Jiang , Jun S. Liu

Interpreting black-box machine learning models is challenging due to their strong dependence on data and inherently non-parametric nature. This paper reintroduces the concept of importance through "Marginal Variable Importance Metric"…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-30 Mohammad Kaviul Anam Khan , Olli Saarela , Rafal Kustra

Variable selection in sparse regression models is an important task as applications ranging from biomedical research to econometrics have shown. Especially for higher dimensional regression problems, for which the link function between…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-10 Burim Ramosaj , Markus Pauly

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Michael Tsang , James Enouen , Yan Liu

We characterize and study variable importance (VIMP) and pairwise variable associations in binary regression trees. A key component involves the node mean squared error for a quantity we refer to as a maximal subtree. The theory naturally…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2009-09-29 Hemant Ishwaran

Understanding how changes in explanatory features affect the unconditional distribution of the outcome is important in many applications. However, existing black-box predictive models are not readily suited for analyzing such questions. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-10 Jing Zhou , Chunlin Li

Risk scores are widely used for clinical decision making and commonly generated from logistic regression models. Machine-learning-based methods may work well for identifying important predictors, but such 'black box' variable selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Yilin Ning , Siqi Li , Marcus Eng Hock Ong , Feng Xie , Bibhas Chakraborty , Daniel Shu Wei Ting , Nan Liu

We provide an inferential framework to assess variable importance for heterogeneous treatment effects. This assessment is especially useful in high-risk domains such as medicine, where decision makers hesitate to rely on black-box treatment…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-11 Pawel Morzywolek , Peter B. Gilbert , Alex Luedtke

A common problem in machine learning is determining if a variable significantly contributes to a model's prediction performance. This problem is aggravated for datasets, such as gene expression datasets, that suffer the worst case of…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-13 Yue Wu , Ted Spaide , Kenji Nakamichi , Russell Van Gelder , Aaron Lee

Importance weighted variational inference (Burda et al., 2015) uses multiple i.i.d. samples to have a tighter variational lower bound. We believe a joint proposal has the potential of reducing the number of redundant samples, and introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-14 Chin-Wei Huang , Kris Sankaran , Eeshan Dhekane , Alexandre Lacoste , Aaron Courville

Sensitivity analysis is an important tool used in many domains of computational science to either gain insight into the mathematical model and interaction of its parameters or study the uncertainty propagation through the input-output…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-02 Juraj Kardos , Wouter Edeling , Diana Suleimenova , Derek Groen , Olaf Schenk

Reliability-oriented sensitivity analysis aims at combining both reliability and sensitivity analyses by quantifying the influence of each input variable of a numerical model on a quantity of interest related to its failure. In particular,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-25 Julien Demange-Chryst , François Bachoc , Jérôme Morio

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-06 Mengjiao Yang , Been Kim