Title
GeCo: quality counterfactual explanations in real time
Abstract
AbstractMachine learning is increasingly applied in high-stakes decision making that directly affect people's lives, and this leads to an increased demand for systems to explain their decisions. Explanations often take the form of counterfactuals, which consists of conveying to the end user what she/he needs to change in order to improve the outcome. Computing counterfactual explanations is challenging, because of the inherent tension between a rich semantics of the domain, and the need for real time response. In this paper we present CeCo, the first system that can compute plausible and feasible counterfactual explanations in real time. At its core, CeCo relies on a genetic algorithm, which is customized to favor searching counterfactual explanations with the smallest number of changes. To achieve real-time performance, we introduce two novel optimizations: Δ-representation of candidate counterfactuals, and partial evaluation of the classifier. We compare empirically CeCo against five other systems described in the literature, and show that it is the only system that can achieve both high quality explanations and real time answers.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.14778/3461535.3461555
Hosted Content
DocType
Volume
Issue
Journal
14
9
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2150-8097
1
0.37
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Maximilian Schleich1598.36
Zixuan Geng210.71
Yihong Zhang3910.65
Dan Suciu496251349.54