Related papers: The Importance of Parameters in Ranking Functions

Algorithmic decisions in critical domains such as hiring, college admissions, and lending are often based on rankings. Given the impact of these decisions on individuals, organizations, and population groups, it is essential to understand…

We propose and study a framework for quantifying the importance of the choices of parameter values to the result of a query over a database. These parameters occur as constants in logical queries, such as conjunctive queries. In our…

While SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) and other feature attribution methods are commonly employed to explain model predictions, their application within information retrieval (IR), particularly for complex outputs such as ranked lists,…

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…

Numerous works propose post-hoc, model-agnostic explanations for learning to rank, focusing on ordering entities by their relevance to a query through feature attribution methods. However, these attributions often weakly correlate or…

Shapley value is a popular approach for measuring the influence of individual features. While Shapley feature attribution is built upon desiderata from game theory, some of its constraints may be less natural in certain machine learning…

Ranking entities such as algorithms, devices, methods, or models based on their performances, while accounting for application-specific preferences, is a challenge. To address this challenge, we establish the foundations of a universal…

Personalized item ranking has been a crucial component contributing to the performance of recommender systems. As a representative approach, pairwise ranking directly optimizes the ranking with user implicit feedback by constructing…

Items from a database are often ranked based on a combination of multiple criteria. A user may have the flexibility to accept combinations that weigh these criteria differently, within limits. On the other hand, this choice of weights can…

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…

Attribution scores reflect how important the feature values in an input entity are for the output of a machine learning model. One of the most popular attribution scores is the SHAP score, which is an instantiation of the general Shapley…

Attribution scores can be applied in data management to quantify the contribution of individual items to conclusions from the data, as part of the explanation of what led to these conclusions. In Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning,…

Ranking is a key aspect of many applications, such as information retrieval, question answering, ad placement and recommender systems. Learning to rank has the goal of estimating a ranking model automatically from training data. In…

Factor importance measures the impact of each feature on output prediction accuracy. Many existing works focus on the model-based importance, but an important feature in one learning algorithm may hold little significance in another model.…

Human decision-makers often receive assistance from data-driven algorithmic systems that provide a score for evaluating objects, including individuals. The scores are generated by a function (mechanism) that takes a set of features as input…

The last decade has seen a revolution in the theory and application of machine learning and pattern recognition. Through these advancements, variable ranking has emerged as an active and growing research area and it is now beginning to be…

In Machine Learning, the $\mathsf{SHAP}$-score is a version of the Shapley value that is used to explain the result of a learned model on a specific entity by assigning a score to every feature. While in general computing Shapley values is…

This paper makes the case for using Shapley value to quantify the importance of random input variables to a function. Alternatives based on the ANOVA decomposition can run into conceptual and computational problems when the input variables…

In spite of increased attention on explainable machine learning models, explaining multi-output predictions has not yet been extensively addressed. Methods that use Shapley values to attribute feature contributions to the decision making…

In this paper we turn the spotlight on a class of lexicographic ranking functions introduced by Bradley, Manna and Sipma in a seminal CAV 2005 paper, and establish for the first time the complexity of some problems involving the inference…