AIMay 11, 2022Code
Keep Your Friends Close and Your Counterfactuals Closer: Improved Learning From Closest Rather Than Plausible Counterfactual Explanations in an Abstract SettingUlrike Kuhl, André Artelt, Barbara Hammer
Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) highlight what changes to a model's input would have changed its prediction in a particular way. CFEs have gained considerable traction as a psychologically grounded solution for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). Recent innovations introduce the notion of computational plausibility for automatically generated CFEs, enhancing their robustness by exclusively creating plausible explanations. However, practical benefits of such a constraint on user experience and behavior is yet unclear. In this study, we evaluate objective and subjective usability of computationally plausible CFEs in an iterative learning design targeting novice users. We rely on a novel, game-like experimental design, revolving around an abstract scenario. Our results show that novice users actually benefit less from receiving computationally plausible rather than closest CFEs that produce minimal changes leading to the desired outcome. Responses in a post-game survey reveal no differences in terms of subjective user experience between both groups. Following the view of psychological plausibility as comparative similarity, this may be explained by the fact that users in the closest condition experience their CFEs as more psychologically plausible than the computationally plausible counterpart. In sum, our work highlights a little-considered divergence of definitions of computational plausibility and psychological plausibility, critically confirming the need to incorporate human behavior, preferences and mental models already at the design stages of XAI approaches. In the interest of reproducible research, all source code, acquired user data, and evaluation scripts of the current study are available: https://github.com/ukuhl/PlausibleAlienZoo
AIJun 13, 2023Code
For Better or Worse: The Impact of Counterfactual Explanations' Directionality on User Behavior in xAIUlrike Kuhl, André Artelt, Barbara Hammer
Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) are a popular approach in explainable artificial intelligence (xAI), highlighting changes to input data necessary for altering a model's output. A CFE can either describe a scenario that is better than the factual state (upward CFE), or a scenario that is worse than the factual state (downward CFE). However, potential benefits and drawbacks of the directionality of CFEs for user behavior in xAI remain unclear. The current user study (N=161) compares the impact of CFE directionality on behavior and experience of participants tasked to extract new knowledge from an automated system based on model predictions and CFEs. Results suggest that upward CFEs provide a significant performance advantage over other forms of counterfactual feedback. Moreover, the study highlights potential benefits of mixed CFEs improving user performance compared to downward CFEs or no explanations. In line with the performance results, users' explicit knowledge of the system is statistically higher after receiving upward CFEs compared to downward comparisons. These findings imply that the alignment between explanation and task at hand, the so-called regulatory fit, may play a crucial role in determining the effectiveness of model explanations, informing future research directions in xAI. To ensure reproducible research, the entire code, underlying models and user data of this study is openly available: https://github.com/ukuhl/DirectionalAlienZoo
AIMay 18, 2022
One Explanation to Rule them All -- Ensemble Consistent ExplanationsAndré Artelt, Stelios Vrachimis, Demetrios Eliades et al.
Transparency is a major requirement of modern AI based decision making systems deployed in real world. A popular approach for achieving transparency is by means of explanations. A wide variety of different explanations have been proposed for single decision making systems. In practice it is often the case to have a set (i.e. ensemble) of decisions that are used instead of a single decision only, in particular in complex systems. Unfortunately, explanation methods for single decision making systems are not easily applicable to ensembles -- i.e. they would yield an ensemble of individual explanations which are not necessarily consistent, hence less useful and more difficult to understand than a single consistent explanation of all observed phenomena. We propose a novel concept for consistently explaining an ensemble of decisions locally with a single explanation -- we introduce a formal concept, as well as a specific implementation using counterfactual explanations.
LGNov 23, 2022
Unsupervised Unlearning of Concept Drift with AutoencodersAndré Artelt, Kleanthis Malialis, Christos Panayiotou et al.
Concept drift refers to a change in the data distribution affecting the data stream of future samples. Consequently, learning models operating on the data stream might become obsolete, and need costly and difficult adjustments such as retraining or adaptation. Existing methods usually implement a local concept drift adaptation scheme, where either incremental learning of the models is used, or the models are completely retrained when a drift detection mechanism triggers an alarm. This paper proposes an alternative approach in which an unsupervised and model-agnostic concept drift adaptation method at the global level is introduced, based on autoencoders. Specifically, the proposed method aims to ``unlearn'' the concept drift without having to retrain or adapt any of the learning models operating on the data. An extensive experimental evaluation is conducted in two application domains. We consider a realistic water distribution network with more than 30 models in-place, from which we create 200 simulated data sets / scenarios. We further consider an image-related task to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
LGMar 8, 2023
"How to make them stay?" -- Diverse Counterfactual Explanations of Employee AttritionAndré Artelt, Andreas Gregoriades
Employee attrition is an important and complex problem that can directly affect an organisation's competitiveness and performance. Explaining the reasons why employees leave an organisation is a key human resource management challenge due to the high costs and time required to attract and keep talented employees. Businesses therefore aim to increase employee retention rates to minimise their costs and maximise their performance. Machine learning (ML) has been applied in various aspects of human resource management including attrition prediction to provide businesses with insights on proactive measures on how to prevent talented employees from quitting. Among these ML methods, the best performance has been reported by ensemble or deep neural networks, which by nature constitute black box techniques and thus cannot be easily interpreted. To enable the understanding of these models' reasoning several explainability frameworks have been proposed. Counterfactual explanation methods have attracted considerable attention in recent years since they can be used to explain and recommend actions to be performed to obtain the desired outcome. However current counterfactual explanations methods focus on optimising the changes to be made on individual cases to achieve the desired outcome. In the attrition problem it is important to be able to foresee what would be the effect of an organisation's action to a group of employees where the goal is to prevent them from leaving the company. Therefore, in this paper we propose the use of counterfactual explanations focusing on multiple attrition cases from historical data, to identify the optimum interventions that an organisation needs to make to its practices/policies to prevent or minimise attrition probability for these cases.
HCMay 6, 2022
Let's Go to the Alien Zoo: Introducing an Experimental Framework to Study Usability of Counterfactual Explanations for Machine LearningUlrike Kuhl, André Artelt, Barbara Hammer
To foster usefulness and accountability of machine learning (ML), it is essential to explain a model's decisions in addition to evaluating its performance. Accordingly, the field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has resurfaced as a topic of active research, offering approaches to address the "how" and "why" of automated decision-making. Within this domain, counterfactual explanations (CFEs) have gained considerable traction as a psychologically grounded approach to generate post-hoc explanations. To do so, CFEs highlight what changes to a model's input would have changed its prediction in a particular way. However, despite the introduction of numerous CFE approaches, their usability has yet to be thoroughly validated at the human level. Thus, to advance the field of XAI, we introduce the Alien Zoo, an engaging, web-based and game-inspired experimental framework. The Alien Zoo provides the means to evaluate usability of CFEs for gaining new knowledge from an automated system, targeting novice users in a domain-general context. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate the practical efficacy and feasibility of this approach in a user study. Our results suggest that users benefit from receiving CFEs compared to no explanation, both in terms of objective performance in the proposed iterative learning task, and subjective usability. With this work, we aim to equip research groups and practitioners with the means to easily run controlled and well-powered user studies to complement their otherwise often more technology-oriented work. Thus, in the interest of reproducible research, we provide the entire code, together with the underlying models and user data.
LGNov 17, 2022
Spatial Graph Convolution Neural Networks for Water Distribution SystemsInaam Ashraf, Luca Hermes, André Artelt et al.
We investigate the task of missing value estimation in graphs as given by water distribution systems (WDS) based on sparse signals as a representative machine learning challenge in the domain of critical infrastructure. The underlying graphs have a comparably low node degree and high diameter, while information in the graph is globally relevant, hence graph neural networks face the challenge of long-term dependencies. We propose a specific architecture based on message passing which displays excellent results for a number of benchmark tasks in the WDS domain. Further, we investigate a multi-hop variation, which requires considerably less resources and opens an avenue towards big WDS graphs.
LGJul 5, 2022
"Even if ..." -- Diverse Semifactual Explanations of RejectAndré Artelt, Barbara Hammer
Machine learning based decision making systems applied in safety critical areas require reliable high certainty predictions. For this purpose, the system can be extended by an reject option which allows the system to reject inputs where only a prediction with an unacceptably low certainty would be possible. While being able to reject uncertain samples is important, it is also of importance to be able to explain why a particular sample was rejected. With the ongoing rise of eXplainable AI (XAI), a lot of explanation methodologies for machine learning based systems have been developed -- explaining reject options, however, is still a novel field where only very little prior work exists. In this work, we propose to explain rejects by semifactual explanations, an instance of example-based explanation methods, which them self have not been widely considered in the XAI community yet. We propose a conceptual modeling of semifactual explanations for arbitrary reject options and empirically evaluate a specific implementation on a conformal prediction based reject option.
LGNov 27, 2022
"Explain it in the Same Way!" -- Model-Agnostic Group Fairness of Counterfactual ExplanationsAndré Artelt, Barbara Hammer
Counterfactual explanations are a popular type of explanation for making the outcomes of a decision making system transparent to the user. Counterfactual explanations tell the user what to do in order to change the outcome of the system in a desirable way. However, it was recently discovered that the recommendations of what to do can differ significantly in their complexity between protected groups of individuals. Providing more difficult recommendations of actions to one group leads to a disadvantage of this group compared to other groups. In this work we propose a model-agnostic method for computing counterfactual explanations that do not differ significantly in their complexity between protected groups.
AIMay 16, 2022
Model Agnostic Local Explanations of RejectAndré Artelt, Roel Visser, Barbara Hammer
The application of machine learning based decision making systems in safety critical areas requires reliable high certainty predictions. Reject options are a common way of ensuring a sufficiently high certainty of predictions made by the system. While being able to reject uncertain samples is important, it is also of importance to be able to explain why a particular sample was rejected. However, explaining general reject options is still an open problem. We propose a model agnostic method for locally explaining arbitrary reject options by means of interpretable models and counterfactual explanations.
LGDec 1, 2022
Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Improved Modeling of ProcessesRiza Velioglu, Jan Philip Göpfert, André Artelt et al.
In modern business processes, the amount of data collected has increased substantially in recent years. Because this data can potentially yield valuable insights, automated knowledge extraction based on process mining has been proposed, among other techniques, to provide users with intuitive access to the information contained therein. At present, the majority of technologies aim to reconstruct explicit business process models. These are directly interpretable but limited concerning the integration of diverse and real-valued information sources. On the other hand, Machine Learning (ML) benefits from the vast amount of data available and can deal with high-dimensional sources, yet it has rarely been applied to being used in processes. In this contribution, we evaluate the capability of modern Transformer architectures as well as more classical ML technologies of modeling process regularities, as can be quantitatively evaluated by their prediction capability. In addition, we demonstrate the capability of attentional properties and feature relevance determination by highlighting features that are crucial to the processes' predictive abilities. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach using five benchmark datasets and show that the ML models are capable of predicting critical outcomes and that the attention mechanisms or XAI components offer new insights into the underlying processes.
LGApr 4, 2022
SAM-kNN Regressor for Online Learning in Water Distribution NetworksJonathan Jakob, André Artelt, Martina Hasenjäger et al.
Water distribution networks are a key component of modern infrastructure for housing and industry. They transport and distribute water via widely branched networks from sources to consumers. In order to guarantee a working network at all times, the water supply company continuously monitors the network and takes actions when necessary -- e.g. reacting to leakages, sensor faults and drops in water quality. Since real world networks are too large and complex to be monitored by a human, algorithmic monitoring systems have been developed. A popular type of such systems are residual based anomaly detection systems that can detect events such as leakages and sensor faults. For a continuous high quality monitoring, it is necessary for these systems to adapt to changed demands and presence of various anomalies. In this work, we propose an adaption of the incremental SAM-kNN classifier for regression to build a residual based anomaly detection system for water distribution networks that is able to adapt to any kind of change.
LGMay 13, 2022
Precise Change Point Detection using Spectral Drift DetectionFabian Hinder, André Artelt, Valerie Vaquet et al.
The notion of concept drift refers to the phenomenon that the data generating distribution changes over time; as a consequence machine learning models may become inaccurate and need adjustment. In this paper we consider the problem of detecting those change points in unsupervised learning. Many unsupervised approaches rely on the discrepancy between the sample distributions of two time windows. This procedure is noisy for small windows, hence prone to induce false positives and not able to deal with more than one drift event in a window. In this paper we rely on structural properties of drift induced signals, which use spectral properties of kernel embedding of distributions. Based thereon we derive a new unsupervised drift detection algorithm, investigate its mathematical properties, and demonstrate its usefulness in several experiments.
LGMar 2, 2024
A Two-Stage Algorithm for Cost-Efficient Multi-instance Counterfactual ExplanationsAndré Artelt, Andreas Gregoriades
Counterfactual explanations constitute among the most popular methods for analyzing black-box systems since they can recommend cost-efficient and actionable changes to the input of a system to obtain the desired system output. While most of the existing counterfactual methods explain a single instance, several real-world problems, such as customer satisfaction, require the identification of a single counterfactual that can satisfy multiple instances (e.g. customers) simultaneously. To address this limitation, in this work, we propose a flexible two-stage algorithm for finding groups of instances and computing cost-efficient multi-instance counterfactual explanations. The paper presents the algorithm and its performance against popular alternatives through a comparative evaluation.
LGOct 16, 2024
Challenges, Methods, Data -- a Survey of Machine Learning in Water Distribution NetworksValerie Vaquet, Fabian Hinder, André Artelt et al.
Research on methods for planning and controlling water distribution networks gains increasing relevance as the availability of drinking water will decrease as a consequence of climate change. So far, the majority of approaches is based on hydraulics and engineering expertise. However, with the increasing availability of sensors, machine learning techniques constitute a promising tool. This work presents the main tasks in water distribution networks, discusses how they relate to machine learning and analyses how the particularities of the domain pose challenges to and can be leveraged by machine learning approaches. Besides, it provides a technical toolkit by presenting evaluation benchmarks and a structured survey of the exemplary task of leakage detection and localization.
AIMay 12, 2025
Interpretable Event Diagnosis in Water Distribution NetworksAndré Artelt, Stelios G. Vrachimis, Demetrios G. Eliades et al.
The increasing penetration of information and communication technologies in the design, monitoring, and control of water systems enables the use of algorithms for detecting and identifying unanticipated events (such as leakages or water contamination) using sensor measurements. However, data-driven methodologies do not always give accurate results and are often not trusted by operators, who may prefer to use their engineering judgment and experience to deal with such events. In this work, we propose a framework for interpretable event diagnosis -- an approach that assists the operators in associating the results of algorithmic event diagnosis methodologies with their own intuition and experience. This is achieved by providing contrasting (i.e., counterfactual) explanations of the results provided by fault diagnosis algorithms; their aim is to improve the understanding of the algorithm's inner workings by the operators, thus enabling them to take a more informed decision by combining the results with their personal experiences. Specifically, we propose counterfactual event fingerprints, a representation of the difference between the current event diagnosis and the closest alternative explanation, which can be presented in a graphical way. The proposed methodology is applied and evaluated on a realistic use case using the L-Town benchmark.
LGFeb 13, 2024
The Effect of Data Poisoning on Counterfactual ExplanationsAndré Artelt, Shubham Sharma, Freddy Lecué et al.
Counterfactual explanations are a widely used approach for examining the predictions of black-box systems. They can offer the opportunity for computational recourse by suggesting actionable changes on how to alter the input to obtain a different (i.e., more favorable) system output. However, recent studies have pointed out their susceptibility to various forms of manipulation. This work studies the vulnerability of counterfactual explanations to data poisoning. We formally introduce and investigate data poisoning in the context of counterfactual explanations for increasing the cost of recourse on three different levels: locally for a single instance, a sub-group of instances, or globally for all instances. In this context, we formally introduce and characterize data poisonings, from which we derive and investigate a general data poisoning mechanism. We demonstrate the impact of such data poisoning in the critical real-world application of explaining event detections in water distribution networks. Additionally, we conduct an extensive empirical evaluation, demonstrating that state-of-the-art counterfactual generation methods and toolboxes are vulnerable to such data poisoning. Furthermore, we find that existing defense methods fail to detect those poisonous samples.
LGJan 14
On the Hardness of Computing Counterfactual and Semifactual Explanations in XAIAndré Artelt, Martin Olsen, Kevin Tierney
Providing clear explanations to the choices of machine learning models is essential for these models to be deployed in crucial applications. Counterfactual and semi-factual explanations have emerged as two mechanisms for providing users with insights into the outputs of their models. We provide an overview of the computational complexity results in the literature for generating these explanations, finding that in many cases, generating explanations is computationally hard. We strengthen the argument for this considerably by further contributing our own inapproximability results showing that not only are explanations often hard to generate, but under certain assumptions, they are also hard to approximate. We discuss the implications of these complexity results for the XAI community and for policymakers seeking to regulate explanations in AI.
NEFeb 11, 2025
Scalable and Robust Physics-Informed Graph Neural Networks for Water Distribution SystemsInaam Ashraf, André Artelt, Barbara Hammer
Water distribution systems (WDSs) are an important part of critical infrastructure becoming increasingly significant in the face of climate change and urban population growth. We propose a robust and scalable surrogate deep learning (DL) model to enable efficient planning, expansion, and rehabilitation of WDSs. Our approach incorporates an improved graph neural network architecture, an adapted physics-informed algorithm, an innovative training scheme, and a physics-preserving data normalization method. Evaluation results on a number of WDSs demonstrate that our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art DL model. Moreover, our method allows us to scale the model to bigger and more realistic WDSs. Furthermore, our approach makes the model more robust to out-of-distribution input features (demands, pipe diameters). Hence, our proposed method constitutes a significant step towards bridging the simulation-to-real gap in the use of artificial intelligence for WDSs.
LGJun 5, 2024
Towards Understanding the Influence of Training Samples on ExplanationsAndré Artelt, Barbara Hammer
Explainable AI (XAI) is widely used to analyze AI systems' decision-making, such as providing counterfactual explanations for recourse. When unexpected explanations occur, users may want to understand the training data properties shaping them. Under the umbrella of data valuation, first approaches have been proposed that estimate the influence of data samples on a given model. This process not only helps determine the data's value, but also offers insights into how individual, potentially noisy, or misleading examples affect a model, which is crucial for interpretable AI. In this work, we apply the concept of data valuation to the significant area of model evaluations, focusing on how individual training samples impact a model's internal reasoning rather than the predictive performance only. Hence, we introduce the novel problem of identifying training samples shaping a given explanation or related quantity, and investigate the particular case of the cost of computational recourse. We propose an algorithm to identify such influential samples and conduct extensive empirical evaluations in two case studies.
AIJun 4, 2024
A Toolbox for Supporting Research on AI in Water Distribution NetworksAndré Artelt, Marios S. Kyriakou, Stelios G. Vrachimis et al.
Drinking water is a vital resource for humanity, and thus, Water Distribution Networks (WDNs) are considered critical infrastructures in modern societies. The operation of WDNs is subject to diverse challenges such as water leakages and contamination, cyber/physical attacks, high energy consumption during pump operation, etc. With model-based methods reaching their limits due to various uncertainty sources, AI methods offer promising solutions to those challenges. In this work, we introduce a Python toolbox for complex scenario modeling \& generation such that AI researchers can easily access challenging problems from the drinking water domain. Besides providing a high-level interface for the easy generation of hydraulic and water quality scenario data, it also provides easy access to popular event detection benchmarks and an environment for developing control algorithms.
CRMay 25, 2023
Adversarial Attacks on Leakage Detectors in Water Distribution NetworksPaul Stahlhofen, André Artelt, Luca Hermes et al.
Many Machine Learning models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks: There exist methodologies that add a small (imperceptible) perturbation to an input such that the model comes up with a wrong prediction. Better understanding of such attacks is crucial in particular for models used in security-critical domains, such as monitoring of water distribution networks, in order to devise counter-measures enhancing model robustness and trustworthiness. We propose a taxonomy for adversarial attacks against machine learning based leakage detectors in water distribution networks. Following up on this, we focus on a particular type of attack: an adversary searching the least sensitive point, that is, the location in the water network where the largest possible undetected leak could occur. Based on a mathematical formalization of the least sensitive point problem, we use three different algorithmic approaches to find a solution. Results are evaluated on two benchmark water distribution networks.
LGJun 15, 2022
"Why Here and Not There?" -- Diverse Contrasting Explanations of Dimensionality ReductionAndré Artelt, Alexander Schulz, Barbara Hammer
Dimensionality reduction is a popular preprocessing and a widely used tool in data mining. Transparency, which is usually achieved by means of explanations, is nowadays a widely accepted and crucial requirement of machine learning based systems like classifiers and recommender systems. However, transparency of dimensionality reduction and other data mining tools have not been considered in much depth yet, still it is crucial to understand their behavior -- in particular practitioners might want to understand why a specific sample got mapped to a specific location. In order to (locally) understand the behavior of a given dimensionality reduction method, we introduce the abstract concept of contrasting explanations for dimensionality reduction, and apply a realization of this concept to the specific application of explaining two dimensional data visualization.
LGFeb 15, 2022
Explaining Reject Options of Learning Vector Quantization ClassifiersAndré Artelt, Johannes Brinkrolf, Roel Visser et al.
While machine learning models are usually assumed to always output a prediction, there also exist extensions in the form of reject options which allow the model to reject inputs where only a prediction with an unacceptably low certainty would be possible. With the ongoing rise of eXplainable AI, a lot of methods for explaining model predictions have been developed. However, understanding why a given input was rejected, instead of being classified by the model, is also of interest. Surprisingly, explanations of rejects have not been considered so far. We propose to use counterfactual explanations for explaining rejects and investigate how to efficiently compute counterfactual explanations of different reject options for an important class of models, namely prototype-based classifiers such as learning vector quantization models.
LGMay 17, 2021
Convex optimization for actionable \& plausible counterfactual explanationsAndré Artelt, Barbara Hammer
Transparency is an essential requirement of machine learning based decision making systems that are deployed in real world. Often, transparency of a given system is achieved by providing explanations of the behavior and predictions of the given system. Counterfactual explanations are a prominent instance of particular intuitive explanations of decision making systems. While a lot of different methods for computing counterfactual explanations exist, only very few work (apart from work from the causality domain) considers feature dependencies as well as plausibility which might limit the set of possible counterfactual explanations. In this work we enhance our previous work on convex modeling for computing counterfactual explanations by a mechanism for ensuring actionability and plausibility of the resulting counterfactual explanations.
LGApr 6, 2021
Contrastive Explanations for Explaining Model AdaptationsAndré Artelt, Fabian Hinder, Valerie Vaquet et al.
Many decision making systems deployed in the real world are not static - a phenomenon known as model adaptation takes place over time. The need for transparency and interpretability of AI-based decision models is widely accepted and thus have been worked on extensively. Usually, explanation methods assume a static system that has to be explained. Explaining non-static systems is still an open research question, which poses the challenge how to explain model adaptations. In this contribution, we propose and (empirically) evaluate a framework for explaining model adaptations by contrastive explanations. We also propose a method for automatically finding regions in data space that are affected by a given model adaptation and thus should be explained.
LGMar 3, 2021
Evaluating Robustness of Counterfactual ExplanationsAndré Artelt, Valerie Vaquet, Riza Velioglu et al.
Transparency is a fundamental requirement for decision making systems when these should be deployed in the real world. It is usually achieved by providing explanations of the system's behavior. A prominent and intuitive type of explanations are counterfactual explanations. Counterfactual explanations explain a behavior to the user by proposing actions -- as changes to the input -- that would cause a different (specified) behavior of the system. However, such explanation methods can be unstable with respect to small changes to the input -- i.e. even a small change in the input can lead to huge or arbitrary changes in the output and of the explanation. This could be problematic for counterfactual explanations, as two similar individuals might get very different explanations. Even worse, if the recommended actions differ considerably in their complexity, one would consider such unstable (counterfactual) explanations as individually unfair. In this work, we formally and empirically study the robustness of counterfactual explanations in general, as well as under different models and different kinds of perturbations. Furthermore, we propose that plausible counterfactual explanations can be used instead of closest counterfactual explanations to improve the robustness and consequently the individual fairness of counterfactual explanations.
LGOct 6, 2020
Efficient computation of contrastive explanationsAndré Artelt, Barbara Hammer
With the increasing deployment of machine learning systems in practice, transparency and explainability have become serious issues. Contrastive explanations are considered to be useful and intuitive, in particular when it comes to explaining decisions to lay people, since they mimic the way in which humans explain. Yet, so far, comparably little research has addressed computationally feasible technologies, which allow guarantees on uniqueness and optimality of the explanation and which enable an easy incorporation of additional constraints. Here, we will focus on specific types of models rather than black-box technologies. We study the relation of contrastive and counterfactual explanations and propose mathematical formalizations as well as a 2-phase algorithm for efficiently computing (plausible) pertinent positives of many standard machine learning models.
LGFeb 12, 2020
Convex Density Constraints for Computing Plausible Counterfactual ExplanationsAndré Artelt, Barbara Hammer
The increasing deployment of machine learning as well as legal regulations such as EU's GDPR cause a need for user-friendly explanations of decisions proposed by machine learning models. Counterfactual explanations are considered as one of the most popular techniques to explain a specific decision of a model. While the computation of "arbitrary" counterfactual explanations is well studied, it is still an open research problem how to efficiently compute plausible and feasible counterfactual explanations. We build upon recent work and propose and study a formal definition of plausible counterfactual explanations. In particular, we investigate how to use density estimators for enforcing plausibility and feasibility of counterfactual explanations. For the purpose of efficient computations, we propose convex density constraints that ensure that the resulting counterfactual is located in a region of the data space of high density.
LGDec 4, 2019
A probability theoretic approach to drifting data in continuous time domainsFabian Hinder, André Artelt, Barbara Hammer
The notion of drift refers to the phenomenon that the distribution, which is underlying the observed data, changes over time. Albeit many attempts were made to deal with drift, formal notions of drift are application-dependent and formulated in various degrees of abstraction and mathematical coherence. In this contribution, we provide a probability theoretical framework, that allows a formalization of drift in continuous time, which subsumes popular notions of drift. In particular, it sheds some light on common practice such as change-point detection or machine learning methodologies in the presence of drift. It gives rise to a new characterization of drift in terms of stochastic dependency between data and time. This particularly intuitive formalization enables us to design a new, efficient drift detection method. Further, it induces a technology, to decompose observed data into a drifting and a non-drifting part.
LGNov 15, 2019
On the computation of counterfactual explanations -- A surveyAndré Artelt, Barbara Hammer
Due to the increasing use of machine learning in practice it becomes more and more important to be able to explain the prediction and behavior of machine learning models. An instance of explanations are counterfactual explanations which provide an intuitive and useful explanations of machine learning models. In this survey we review model-specific methods for efficiently computing counterfactual explanations of many different machine learning models and propose methods for models that have not been considered in literature so far.
LGAug 2, 2019
Efficient computation of counterfactual explanations of LVQ modelsAndré Artelt, Barbara Hammer
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 explanations. Yet, it is still an open research problem how to efficiently compute counterfactual explanations for many models. We investigate how to efficiently compute counterfactual explanations for an important class of models, prototype-based classifiers such as learning vector quantization models. In particular, we derive specific convex and non-convex programs depending on the used metric.
LGFeb 25, 2019
Adversarial attacks hidden in plain sightJan Philip Göpfert, André Artelt, Heiko Wersing et al.
Convolutional neural networks have been used to achieve a string of successes during recent years, but their lack of interpretability remains a serious issue. Adversarial examples are designed to deliberately fool neural networks into making any desired incorrect classification, potentially with very high certainty. Several defensive approaches increase robustness against adversarial attacks, demanding attacks of greater magnitude, which lead to visible artifacts. By considering human visual perception, we compose a technique that allows to hide such adversarial attacks in regions of high complexity, such that they are imperceptible even to an astute observer. We carry out a user study on classifying adversarially modified images to validate the perceptual quality of our approach and find significant evidence for its concealment with regards to human visual perception.