{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/model-explanations-via-the-axiomatic-causal","title":"Model Explanations via the Axiomatic Causal Lens","arxiv_id":"2109.03890","date":"2021-09-08","proceeding":null,"authors":["Gagan Biradar","Vignesh Viswanathan","Yair Zick"],"abstract":"Explaining the decisions of black-box models is a central theme in the study of trustworthy ML. Numerous measures have been proposed in the literature; however, none of them take an axiomatic approach to causal explainability. In this work, we propose three explanation measures which aggregate the set of all but-for causes -- a necessary and sufficient explanation -- into feature importance weights. Our first measure is a natural adaptation of Chockler and Halpern's notion of causal responsibility, whereas the other two correspond to existing game-theoretic influence measures. We present an axiomatic treatment for our proposed indices, showing that they can be uniquely characterized by a set of desirable properties. We also extend our approach to derive a new method to compute the Shapley-Shubik and Banzhaf indices for black-box model explanations. Finally, we analyze and compare the necessity and sufficiency of all our proposed explanation measures in practice using the Adult-Income dataset. Thus, our work is the first to formally bridge the gap between model explanations, game-theoretic influence, and causal analysis.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.03890v6","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.03890v6.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"model-explanations-via-the-axiomatic-causal","repo_url":"https://github.com/gabi-1337/causal-explanations","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"feature-importance","task_name":"Feature Importance"},{"task_slug":"model","task_name":"model"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}