Papers › ShaRP: A Novel Feature Importance Framework for Ranking

ShaRP: A Novel Feature Importance Framework for Ranking

30 Jan 2024arXiv:2401.16744archive 2025-07-28

Venetia Pliatsika, Joao Fonseca, Kateryna Akhynko, Ivan Shevchenko, Julia Stoyanovich

Algorithmic decisions in critical domains such as hiring, college admissions, and lending are often based on rankings. Given the impact of these decisions on individuals, organizations, and population groups, it is essential to understand them-to help individuals improve their ranking position, design better ranking procedures, and ensure legal compliance. In this paper, we argue that explainability methods for classification and regression, such as SHAP, are insufficient for ranking tasks, and present ShaRP-Shapley Values for Rankings and Preferences-a framework that explains the contributions of features to various aspects of a ranked outcome. ShaRP computes feature contributions for various ranking-specific profit functions, such as rank and top-k, and also includes a novel Shapley value-based method for explaining pairwise preference outcomes. We provide a flexible implementation of ShaRP, capable of efficiently and comprehensively explaining ranked and pairwise outcomes over tabular data, in score-based ranking and learning-to-rank tasks. Finally, to evaluate ShaRP and compare it with other explainability methods, we define ranking-specific explanation metrics and conduct an extensive experimental analysis, demonstrating the framework's flexibility and efficiency.

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check_feature_names dataresponsibly/sharp/sharp/utils/_checks.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · c99f004b22393f38 · report
check_inputs dataresponsibly/sharp/sharp/utils/_checks.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 22088f24b20ccd0e · report
jaccard_similarity dataresponsibly/sharp/sharp/metrics/_base.py official repository ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 9363f8db4167743d · report
kendall_similarity dataresponsibly/sharp/sharp/metrics/_base.py official repository ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 84a872b9ed22ce46 · report
outcome_fidelity dataresponsibly/sharp/sharp/metrics/_fidelity.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 457bb5dd3a7ef0f7 · report
parallel_loop dataresponsibly/sharp/sharp/utils/_parallelize.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · ae1d4e049853306d · report
cross_method_explanation_consistency dataresponsibly/sharp/sharp/metrics/_consistency.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · a7724eee12dabc39 · report
row_wise_explanation_sensitivity dataresponsibly/sharp/sharp/metrics/_sensitivity.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 5e7ac78a48d288a2 · report

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