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Related papers: Counterfactual Realizability

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The Counterfactual package implements the estimation and inference methods of Chernozhukov, Fern\'andez-Val and Melly (2013) for counterfactual analysis. The counterfactual distributions considered are the result of changing either the…

Computation · Statistics 2017-11-02 Mingli Chen , Victor Chernozhukov , Iván Fernández-Val , Blaise Melly

To act safely and ethically in the real world, agents must be able to reason about harm and avoid harmful actions. However, to date there is no statistical method for measuring harm and factoring it into algorithmic decisions. In this paper…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Jonathan G. Richens , Rory Beard , Daniel H. Thompson

In this paper we look at popular fairness methods that use causal counterfactuals. These methods capture the intuitive notion that a prediction is fair if it coincides with the prediction that would have been made if someone's race, gender…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-12 Jake Fawkes , Robin Evans , Dino Sejdinovic

One of the main concerns while deploying machine learning models in real-world applications is fairness. Counterfactual fairness has emerged as an intuitive and natural definition of fairness. However, existing methodologies for enforcing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Krishn Vishwas Kher , Saksham Mittal , Aditya Varun , Shantanu Das , SakethaNath Jagarlapudi

Counterfactual explanations are widely used to communicate how inputs must change for a model to alter its prediction. For a single instance, many valid counterfactuals can exist, which leaves open the possibility for an explanation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 James Hinns , Sofie Goethals , Stephan Van der Veeken , Theodoros Evgeniou , David Martens

Counterfactual reasoning is pivotal in human cognition and especially important for providing explanations and making decisions. While Judea Pearl's influential approach is theoretically elegant, its generation of a counterfactual scenario…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Guang-Yuan Hao , Jiji Zhang , Biwei Huang , Hao Wang , Kun Zhang

Counterfactual explanations are attracting significant attention due to the flourishing applications of machine learning models in consequential domains. A counterfactual plan consists of multiple possibilities to modify a given instance so…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Ngoc Bui , Duy Nguyen , Viet Anh Nguyen

The framework of Pearl's Causal Hierarchy (PCH) formalizes three types of reasoning: probabilistic (i.e. purely observational), interventional, and counterfactual, that reflect the progressive sophistication of human thought regarding…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Julian Dörfler , Benito van der Zander , Markus Bläser , Maciej Liskiewicz

Counterfactual explanations can be obtained by identifying the smallest change made to a feature vector to qualitatively influence a prediction; for example, from 'loan rejected' to 'awarded' or from 'high risk of cardiovascular disease' to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Martin Pawelczyk , Johannes Haug , Klaus Broelemann , Gjergji Kasneci

We present a general framework for evaluating image counterfactuals. The power and flexibility of deep generative models make them valuable tools for learning mechanisms in structural causal models. However, their flexibility makes…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Miguel Monteiro , Fabio De Sousa Ribeiro , Nick Pawlowski , Daniel C. Castro , Ben Glocker

Fairness-aware machine learning has attracted a surge of attention in many domains, such as online advertising, personalized recommendation, and social media analysis in web applications. Fairness-aware machine learning aims to eliminate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Jing Ma , Ruocheng Guo , Aidong Zhang , Jundong Li

We present a human-in-the-loop approach to generate counterfactual (CF) explanations that preserve global and local feasibility constraints. Global feasibility constraints refer to the causal constraints that are necessary for generating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Homayun Afrabandpey , Michael Spranger

Counterfactual reasoning, a hallmark of intelligence, consists of three steps: inferring latent variables from observations (abduction), constructing alternatives (interventions), and predicting their outcomes (prediction). This skill is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Aniket Vashishtha , Qirun Dai , Hongyuan Mei , Amit Sharma , Chenhao Tan , Hao Peng

Existing tools for explaining complex models and systems are associational rather than causal and do not provide mechanistic understanding. We propose a new notion called counterfactual explainability for causal attribution that is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-07 Zijun Gao , Qingyuan Zhao

Being able to provide counterfactual interventions - sequences of actions we would have had to take for a desirable outcome to happen - is essential to explain how to change an unfavourable decision by a black-box machine learning model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-08 Giovanni De Toni , Bruno Lepri , Andrea Passerini

This article extends the widely-used synthetic controls estimator for evaluating causal effects of policy changes to quantile functions. The proposed method provides a geometrically faithful estimate of the entire counterfactual quantile…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-01-03 Florian Gunsilius

A key challenge of oversampling in imbalanced classification is that the generation of new minority samples often neglects the usage of majority classes, resulting in most new minority sampling spreading the whole minority space. In view of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Hao Luo , Li Liu

When applied in healthcare, reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to dynamically match the right interventions to subjects to maximize population benefit. However, the learned policy may disproportionately allocate efficacious actions to one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-15 Jitao Wang , Chengchun Shi , John D. Piette , Joshua R. Loftus , Donglin Zeng , Zhenke Wu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great promise in domains like healthcare and robotics but often struggles with adoption due to its lack of interpretability. Counterfactual explanations, which address "what if" scenarios, provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Shuyang Dong , Shangtong Zhang , Lu Feng

Counterfactual explanations elucidate algorithmic decisions by pointing to scenarios that would have led to an alternative, desired outcome. Giving insight into the model's behavior, they hint users towards possible actions and give grounds…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-05 Susanne Dandl , Kristin Blesch , Timo Freiesleben , Gunnar König , Jan Kapar , Bernd Bischl , Marvin Wright