2021/04/15 by Dieter Brughmans, Brughmans, Dieter, Pieter Leyman +3 · 9 citations
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Imbalanced Data Classification Techniques #Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO) #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning in Healthcare
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2104.07411
openalex publication_date 2021/04/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper we suggest NICE: a new algorithm to generate counterfactual explanations for heterogeneous tabular data. The design of our algorithm specifically takes into account algorithmic requirements that often emerge in real-life deployments: (1) the ability to provide an explanation for all predictions, (2) being able to handle any classification model (also non-differentiable ones), and (3) being efficient in run time. More specifically, our approach exploits information from a nearest unlike neighbour to speed up the search process, by iteratively introducing feature values from this neighbour in the instance to be explained. We propose four versions of NICE, one without optimization and, three which optimize the explanations for one of the following properties: sparsity, proximity or plausibility. An extensive empirical comparison on 40 datasets shows that our algorithm outperforms the current state-of-the-art in terms of these criteria. Our analyses show a trade-off between on the one hand plausibility and on the other hand proximity or sparsity, with our different optimization methods offering users the choice to select the types of counterfactuals that they prefer. An open-source implementation of NICE can be found at https://github.com/ADMAntwerp/NICE.