1,721,159 research outputs found
Counterfactual explanations and how to find them: literature review and benchmarking
Interpretable machine learning aims at unveiling the reasons behind predictions returned by uninterpretable classifiers. One of the most valuable types of explanation consists of counterfactuals. A counterfactual explanation reveals what should have been different in an instance to observe a diverse outcome. For instance, a bank customer asks for a loan that is rejected. The counterfactual explanation consists of what should have been different for the customer in order to have the loan accepted. Recently, there has been an explosion of proposals for counterfactual explainers. The aim of this work is to survey the most recent explainers returning counterfactual explanations. We categorize explainers based on the approach adopted to return the counterfactuals, and we label them according to characteristics of the method and properties of the counterfactuals returned. In addition, we visually compare the explanations, and we report quantitative benchmarking assessing minimality, actionability, stability, diversity, discriminative power, and running time. The results make evident that the current state of the art does not provide a counterfactual explainer able to guarantee all these properties simultaneously
Causality-Aware Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations
A main drawback of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) approaches is the feature independence assumption, hindering the study of potential variable dependencies. This leads to approximating black box behaviors by analyzing the effects on randomly generated feature values that may rarely occur in the original samples. This paper addresses this issue by integrating causal knowledge in an XAI method to enhance transparency and enable users to assess the quality of the generated explanations. Specifically, we propose a novel extension to a widely used local and model-agnostic explainer, which encodes explicit causal relationships within the data surrounding the instance being explained. Extensive experiments show that our approach overcomes the original method in terms of faithfully replicating the black-box model's mechanism and the consistency and reliability of the generated explanations
Individual and Collective Stop-Based Adaptive Trajectory Segmentation
Identifying the portions of trajectory data where movement ends and a significant stop starts
is a basic, yet fundamental task that can affect the quality of any mobility analytics process.
Most of the many existing solutions adopted by researchers and practitioners are simply
based on fixed spatial and temporal thresholds stating when the moving object remained still
for a significant amount of time, yet such thresholds remain as static parameters for the user
to guess. In this work we study the trajectory segmentation from a multi-granularity perspec tive, looking for a better understanding of the problem and for an automatic, user-adaptive
and essentially parameter-free solution that flexibly adjusts the segmentation criteria to the
specific user under study and to the geographical areas they traverse. Experiments over
real data, and comparison against simple and state-of-the-art competitors show that the
flexibility of the proposed methods has a positive impact on results
Defining Geographic Markets from Probabilistic Clusters: A Machine Learning Algorithm Applied to Supermarket Scanner Data
This Sounds Like That: Explainable Audio Classification via Prototypical Parts
The demand for understanding machine learning models has led to the development of interpretable-by-design models that provide both outcomes and explanations. In this paper, we extend the concept of Prototypical Part Networks to the audio domain with SonicProtoPNet. This model enables a “this sounds like that” reasoning for audio classification, where a test instance audio is classified based on prototypical parts that most resemble specific areas of specific training instances. Quantitative results from genre and environmental sound classification, as well as musical instrument recognition tasks, demonstrate satisfactory per formance using the Log-Mel transformation of the audio input signal, further supported by backbone pre-training on image-input data. Furthermore, we introduce a high-quality back-soundification method for the learned sonic prototypes, facilitating intuitive interpretation of classification decisions through auditory inspection
City Indicators for Mobility Data Mining
Classifying cities and other geographical units is a classical task in
urban geography, typically carried out through manual analysis
of specific characteristics of the area. The primary objective of
this paper is to contribute to this process through the definition
of a wide set of city indicators that capture different aspects
of the city, mainly based on human mobility and automatically
computed from a set of data sources, including mobility traces
and road networks. The secondary objective is to prove that such
set of characteristics is indeed rich enough to support a simple
task of geographical transfer learning, namely identifying which
groups of geographical areas can share with each other a basic
traffic prediction model. The experiments show that similarity in
terms of our city indicators also means better transferability of
predictive models, opening the way to the development of more
sophisticated solutions that leverage city indicators
- …
