Papers › MACE: An Efficient Model-Agnostic Framework for Counterfactual Explanation
MACE: An Efficient Model-Agnostic Framework for Counterfactual Explanation
Wenzhuo Yang, Jia Li, Caiming Xiong, Steven C. H. Hoi
Counterfactual explanation is an important Explainable AI technique to explain machine learning predictions. Despite being studied actively, existing optimization-based methods often assume that the underlying machine-learning model is differentiable and treat categorical attributes as continuous ones, which restricts their real-world applications when categorical attributes have many different values or the model is non-differentiable. To make counterfactual explanation suitable for real-world applications, we propose a novel framework of Model-Agnostic Counterfactual Explanation (MACE), which adopts a newly designed pipeline that can efficiently handle non-differentiable machine-learning models on a large number of feature values. in our MACE approach, we propose a novel RL-based method for finding good counterfactual examples and a gradient-less descent method for improving proximity. Experiments on public datasets validate the effectiveness with better validity, sparsity and proximity.
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