A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Develops methods for finding counterfactual explanations in sequential decision making.
problem Finding counterfactual explanations for sequential decision making processes.
method Formal characterization of sequential actions and states using Markov decision processes and Gumbel-Max structural causal model. Introduces a polynomial time algorithm based on dynamic programming.
result Algorithm finds optimal counterfactual explanations for sequential decision making.
We examine counterfactual explanations for explaining the decisions made by model-based AI systems. The counterfactual approach we consider defines an explanation as a set of the system's data inputs that causally drives the decision (i.e., changing the inputs in the set changes the decision) and is irreducible (i.e., …
MCCE generates realistic counterfactual explanations for tabular data.
problem Creating valid and actionable counterfactual explanations for complex tabular data.
method MCCE models the joint distribution of features and decision using an autoregressive generative model with decision trees. It samples counterfactuals and removes invalid ones.
result MCCE outperforms state-of-the-art methods on various performance metrics and is faster.
We define and compute plausible counterfactual explanations using density constraints.
problem Efficiently compute plausible counterfactual explanations for machine learning models.
method Propose and study a formal definition of plausible counterfactual explanations, use density estimators, and introduce convex density constraints.
result Convex density constraints ensure plausible and feasible counterfactual explanations.
The paper introduces metrics to rank potential outcomes for better decision-making.
problem Optimal action selection in uncertain situations using causal reasoning.
method Introducing two new metrics: probabilities of potential outcome ranking (PoR) and probability of achieving the best potential outcome (PoB). Establishing identification theorems and deriving bounds for these metrics, and presenting estimation methods.
result The estimators' finite-sample properties and their application to a real-world dataset are demonstrated.
Decision-makers are faced with the challenge of estimating what is likely to happen when they take an action. For instance, if I choose not to treat this patient, are they likely to die? Practitioners commonly use supervised learning algorithms to fit predictive models that help decision-makers reason about likely futu…
The paper tackles optimal policy learning with asymmetric counterfactual utilities in healthcare decisions.
problem Learning optimal policies from observed data with asymmetric counterfactual utilities.
method The approach involves identifying and minimizing the maximum expected utility loss using statistical decision theory and solving intermediate classification problems.
result One can learn minimax loss decision rules from observed data.
Although deep reinforcement learning agents have produced impressive results in many domains, their decision making is difficult to explain to humans. To address this problem, past work has mainly focused on explaining why an action was chosen in a given state. A different type of explanation that is useful is a counte…
Post-hoc explanations of machine learning models are crucial for people to understand and act on algorithmic predictions. An intriguing class of explanations is through counterfactuals, hypothetical examples that show people how to obtain a different prediction. We posit that effective counterfactual explanations shoul…
Machine learning can impact people with legal or ethical consequences when it is used to automate decisions in areas such as insurance, lending, hiring, and predictive policing. In many of these scenarios, previous decisions have been made that are unfairly biased against certain subpopulations, for example those of a …
A new framework for robust and coherent counterfactual transports.
problem Estimating joint distributions over counterfactual outcomes in personalized decision-making and treatment risk assessment.
method Counterfactual cocycles that use algebraic structure to provide coherence and identifiability guarantees, bridging the gap between bijective SCMs and OT methods.
result Counterfactual cocycles provide state-of-the-art performance and noise-robustness across synthetic benchmarks and a real-world study.
Machine learning (ML) can automate decision-making by learning to predict decisions from historical data. However, these predictors may inherit discriminatory policies from past decisions and reproduce unfair decisions. In this paper, we propose two algorithms that adjust fitted ML predictors to make them fair. We focu…
Algorithmic risk assessments are increasingly used to help humans make decisions in high-stakes settings, such as medicine, criminal justice and education. In each of these cases, the purpose of the risk assessment tool is to inform actions, such as medical treatments or release conditions, often with the aim of reduci…
The increasing use of machine learning in practice and legal regulations like EU's GDPR cause the necessity to be able to explain the prediction and behavior of machine learning models. A prominent example of particularly intuitive explanations of AI models in the context of decision making are counterfactual explanati…