Coverage-Validity-Aware Algorithmic Recourse
This addresses the issue of ensuring recourse validity over time for users of machine learning models, though it is incremental as it builds on existing recourse methods.
The paper tackles the problem of algorithmic recourse becoming invalid when predictive models are updated, proposing a framework to generate robust, model-agnostic recourses using a coverage-validity-aware linear surrogate, with numerical results demonstrating its usefulness and robustness.
Algorithmic recourse emerges as a prominent technique to promote the explainability, transparency, and ethics of machine learning models. Existing algorithmic recourse approaches often assume an invariant predictive model; however, the predictive model is usually updated upon the arrival of new data. Thus, a recourse that is valid respective to the present model may become invalid for the future model. To resolve this issue, we propose a novel framework to generate a model-agnostic recourse that exhibits robustness to model shifts. Our framework first builds a coverage-validity-aware linear surrogate of the nonlinear (black-box) model; then, the recourse is generated with respect to the linear surrogate. We establish a theoretical connection between our coverage-validity-aware linear surrogate and the minimax probability machines (MPM). We then prove that by prescribing different covariance robustness, the proposed framework recovers popular regularizations for MPM, including the $\ell_2$-regularization and class-reweighting. Furthermore, we show that our surrogate pushes the approximate hyperplane intuitively, facilitating not only robust but also interpretable recourses. The numerical results demonstrate the usefulness and robustness of our framework.