TabChange: Precise Attribute Changes in Tabular Data
This work provides a method for precise attribute editing in tabular data, benefiting practitioners needing realistic counterfactual explanations for machine learning models.
TabChange addresses the challenge of generating natural and minimally changed counterfactual instances in tabular data by analyzing attribute relationships and using an adversarial framework to remove attribute information from the latent space, achieving more proximal and valid counterfactuals across seven datasets.
Modifying an attribute in tabular data often introduces an unnatural instance by breaking its relationships with other attributes. The modified instance must be both natural and minimally changed from the original instance. This paper addresses the challenge of generating such a modified instance. We identify key limitations in existing approaches: generative models either don't support instance-level attribute editing or, in the case of methods like CVAE, retain attribute information in the latent space, leading to unnecessary modifications. To solve this, we propose TabChange, an approach that analyzes the relationship between the attribute of interest and other attributes in the dataset. If the relationship is weak, it simply flips the attribute; if it is strong, it uses an adversarial framework that removes information about the attribute in the latent space representation. This removal enables precise modifications, making only the necessary adjustments to maintain naturalness. Our experiments across seven datasets show that TabChange generates counterfactuals in attributes that are comparable in naturalness and are more proximal to their original instances. This leads to a higher number of valid counterfactuals and a lower number of invalid counterfactuals compared to the baselines.