Papers › Explaining Predictive Uncertainty with Information Theoretic Shapley Values

Explaining Predictive Uncertainty with Information Theoretic Shapley Values

21 Sep 2023NeurIPS 2023 11archive 2025-07-28

Researchers in explainable artificial intelligence have developed numerous methods for helping users understand the predictions of complex supervised learning models. By contrast, explaining the uncertainty of model outputs has received relatively little attention. We adapt the popular Shapley value framework to explain various types of predictive uncertainty, quantifying each feature's contribution to the conditional entropy of individual model outputs. We consider games with modified characteristic functions and find deep connections between the resulting Shapley values and fundamental quantities from information theory and conditional independence testing. We outline inference procedures for finite sample error rate control with provable guarantees, and implement efficient algorithms that perform well in a range of experiments on real and simulated data. Our method has applications to covariate shift detection, active learning, feature selection, and active feature-value acquisition.

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Tasks

Active LearningDecision Making Under UncertaintyDepth Aleatoric Uncertainty EstimationExplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)Uncertainty Quantification

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Methods

Characteristic FunctionsDeep EnsemblesMonte Carlo DropoutSHAP

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