Papers › Interpretable Counterfactual Explanations Guided by Prototypes

Interpretable Counterfactual Explanations Guided by Prototypes

3 Jul 2019arXiv:1907.02584archive 2025-07-28

Arnaud Van Looveren, Janis Klaise

We propose a fast, model agnostic method for finding interpretable counterfactual explanations of classifier predictions by using class prototypes. We show that class prototypes, obtained using either an encoder or through class specific k-d trees, significantly speed up the the search for counterfactual instances and result in more interpretable explanations. We introduce two novel metrics to quantitatively evaluate local interpretability at the instance level. We use these metrics to illustrate the effectiveness of our method on an image and tabular dataset, respectively MNIST and Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Diagnostic). The method also eliminates the computational bottleneck that arises because of numerical gradient evaluation for black box models.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

SeldonIO/alibi officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtfNOASSERTION report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Diagnostic

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

InterpretabilitySPEED

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections