Related papers: Accurate estimation of feature importance faithful…
Feature importance aims at measuring how crucial each input feature is for model prediction. It is widely used in feature engineering, model selection and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). In this paper, we propose a new tree-model…
In many studies, we want to determine the influence of certain features on a dependent variable. More specifically, we are interested in the strength of the influence -- i.e., is the feature relevant? -- and, if so, how the feature…
Random forest is effective for prediction tasks but the randomness of tree generation hinders interpretability in feature importance analysis. To address this, we proposed DT-Sampler, a SAT-based method for measuring feature importance in…
Estimating feature importance is a significant aspect of explaining data-based models. Besides explaining the model itself, an equally relevant question is which features are important in the underlying data generating process. We present a…
We propose a modification that corrects for split-improvement variable importance measures in Random Forests and other tree-based methods. These methods have been shown to be biased towards increasing the importance of features with more…
Practitioners use feature importance to rank and eliminate weak predictors during model development in an effort to simplify models and improve generality. Unfortunately, they also routinely conflate such feature importance measures with…
Note that a newer expanded version of this paper is now available at: arXiv:1802.03888 It is critical in many applications to understand what features are important for a model, and why individual predictions were made. For tree ensemble…
The recent increase in the deployment of machine learning models in critical domains such as healthcare, criminal justice, and finance has highlighted the need for trustworthy methods that can explain these models to stakeholders. Feature…
Deep forest is a non-differentiable deep model which has achieved impressive empirical success across a wide variety of applications, especially on categorical/symbolic or mixed modeling tasks. Many of the application fields prefer…
Most accurate predictions are typically obtained by learning machines with complex feature spaces (as e.g. induced by kernels). Unfortunately, such decision rules are hardly accessible to humans and cannot easily be used to gain insights…
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…
Tree-based algorithms such as random forests and gradient boosted trees continue to be among the most popular and powerful machine learning models used across multiple disciplines. The conventional wisdom of estimating the impact of a…
Generalized linear and additive models are very efficient regression tools but the selection of relevant terms becomes difficult if higher order interactions are needed. In contrast, tree-based methods also known as recursive partitioning…
Feature importance scores are ubiquitous tools for understanding the predictions of machine learning models. However, many popular attribution methods suffer from high instability due to random sampling. Leveraging novel ideas from…
With wide application of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it has become particularly important to make decisions of AI systems explainable and transparent. In this paper, we proposed a new Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) method…
Tree-based methods are powerful nonparametric techniques in statistics and machine learning. However, their effectiveness, particularly in finite-sample settings, is not fully understood. Recent applications have revealed their surprising…
Decision trees are widely used for non-linear modeling, as they capture interactions between predictors while producing inherently interpretable models. Despite their popularity, performing inference on the non-linear fit remains largely…
The concept of trustworthy AI has gained widespread attention lately. One of the aspects relevant to trustworthy AI is robustness of ML models. In this study, we show how to probabilistically quantify robustness against naturally occurring…
Complex problems may require sophisticated, non-linear learning methods such as kernel machines or deep neural networks to achieve state of the art prediction accuracies. However, high prediction accuracies are not the only objective to…
Along with accurate prediction, understanding the contribution of each feature to the making of the prediction, i.e., the importance of the feature, is a desirable and arguably necessary component of a machine learning model. For a complex…