Papers › Inverse Classification for Comparison-based Interpretability in Machine Learning

Inverse Classification for Comparison-based Interpretability in Machine Learning

22 Dec 2017arXiv:1712.08443archive 2025-07-28

Thibault Laugel, Marie-Jeanne Lesot, Christophe Marsala, Xavier Renard, Marcin Detyniecki

In the context of post-hoc interpretability, this paper addresses the task of explaining the prediction of a classifier, considering the case where no information is available, neither on the classifier itself, nor on the processed data (neither the training nor the test data). It proposes an instance-based approach whose principle consists in determining the minimal changes needed to alter a prediction: given a data point whose classification must be explained, the proposed method consists in identifying a close neighbour classified differently, where the closeness definition integrates a sparsity constraint. This principle is implemented using observation generation in the Growing Spheres algorithm. Experimental results on two datasets illustrate the relevance of the proposed approach that can be used to gain knowledge about the classifier.

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carla-recourse/CARLA mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
wangyongjie-ntu/CFAI mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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BIG-bench Machine LearningClassificationGeneral Classification

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