On the Computation of Example-Based Abductive Explanations for Random Forests

On the Computation of Example-Based Abductive Explanations for Random Forests

Gilles Audemard, Jean-Marie Lagniez, Pierre Marquis, Nicolas Szczepanski

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3679-3687. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/407

We show how to define and compute example-based abductive explanations. Such explanations are guaranteed to be 100% correct, fairly general, and persuasive enough since they cover sufficiently many reference instances furnished by the explainee. We prove that the latter coverage condition yields a complexity shift to the second level of the polynomial hierarchy. We present a CEGAR-based algorithm to derive such explanations, and show how to modify it to derive most anchored example-based abductive explanations, i.e., example-based abductive explanations that cover as many reference instances as possible. We also explain how to reduce example-based abductive explanations to get subset-minimal explanations. Experiments in the case of random forest classifiers show that our CEGAR-based algorithm is quite efficient in practice.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Explainable/Interpretable machine learning
Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: CSO: Applications
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Computational complexity of reasoning