The Skyline of Counterfactual Explanations for Machine Learning Decision Models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Counterfactual explanations are minimum changes of a given input to alter the original prediction by a machine learning model, usually from an undesirable prediction to a desirable one. Previous works frame this problem as a constrained cost minimization, where the cost is defined as L1/L2 distance (or variants) over multiple features to measure the change. In real-life applications, features of different types are hardly comparable and it is difficult to measure the changes of heterogeneous features by a single cost function. Moreover, existing approaches do not support interactive exploration of counterfactual explanations. To address above issues, we propose the skyline counterfactual explanations that define the skyline of counterfactual explanations as all non-dominated changes. We solve this problem as multi-objective optimization over actionable features. This approach does not require any cost function over heterogeneous features. With the skyline, the user can interactively and incrementally refine their goals on the features and magnitudes to be changed, especially when lacking prior knowledge to express their needs precisely. Intensive experiment results on three real-life datasets demonstrate that the skyline method provides a friendly way for finding interesting counterfactual explanations, and achieves superior results compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".