No Arabic abstract
Deep neural networks have gained momentum based on their accuracy, but their interpretability is often criticised. As a result, they are labelled as black boxes. In response, several methods have been proposed in the literature to explain their predictions. Among the explanatory methods, Shapley values is a feature attribution method favoured for its robust theoretical foundation. However, the analysis of feature attributions using Shapley values requires choosing a baseline that represents the concept of missingness. An arbitrary choice of baseline could negatively impact the explanatory power of the method and possibly lead to incorrect interpretations. In this paper, we present a method for choosing a baseline according to a neutrality value: as a parameter selected by decision-makers, the point at which their choices are determined by the model predictions being either above or below it. Hence, the proposed baseline is set based on a parameter that depends on the actual use of the model. This procedure stands in contrast to how other baselines are set, i.e. without accounting for how the model is used. We empirically validate our choice of baseline in the context of binary classification tasks, using two datasets: a synthetic dataset and a dataset derived from the financial domain.
Shapley values are great analytical tools in game theory to measure the importance of a player in a game. Due to their axiomatic and desirable properties such as efficiency, they have become popular for feature importance analysis in data science and machine learning. However, the time complexity to compute Shapley values based on the original formula is exponential, and as the number of features increases, this becomes infeasible. Castro et al. [1] developed a sampling algorithm, to estimate Shapley values. In this work, we propose a new sampling method based on a multilinear extension technique as applied in game theory. The aim is to provide a more efficient (sampling) method for estimating Shapley values. Our method is applicable to any machine learning model, in particular for either multi-class classifications or regression problems. We apply the method to estimate Shapley values for multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and through experimentation on two datasets, we demonstrate that our method provides more accurate estimations of the Shapley values by reducing the variance of the sampling statistics.
The problem of explaining the behavior of deep neural networks has recently gained a lot of attention. While several attribution methods have been proposed, most come without strong theoretical foundations, which raises questions about their reliability. On the other hand, the literature on cooperative game theory suggests Shapley values as a unique way of assigning relevance scores such that certain desirable properties are satisfied. Unfortunately, the exact evaluation of Shapley values is prohibitively expensive, exponential in the number of input features. In this work, by leveraging recent results on uncertainty propagation, we propose a novel, polynomial-time approximation of Shapley values in deep neural networks. We show that our method produces significantly better approximations of Shapley values than existing state-of-the-art attribution methods.
Transformers have become one of the most important architectural innovations in deep learning and have enabled many breakthroughs over the past few years. Here we propose a simple network architecture, gMLP, based on MLPs with gating, and show that it can perform as well as Transformers in key language and vision applications. Our comparisons show that self-attention is not critical for Vision Transformers, as gMLP can achieve the same accuracy. For BERT, our model achieves parity with Transformers on pretraining perplexity and is better on some downstream NLP tasks. On finetuning tasks where gMLP performs worse, making the gMLP model substantially larger can close the gap with Transformers. In general, our experiments show that gMLP can scale as well as Transformers over increased data and compute.
The true population-level importance of a variable in a prediction task provides useful knowledge about the underlying data-generating mechanism and can help in deciding which measurements to collect in subsequent experiments. Valid statistical inference on this importance is a key component in understanding the population of interest. We present a computationally efficient procedure for estimating and obtaining valid statistical inference on the Shapley Population Variable Importance Measure (SPVIM). Although the computational complexity of the true SPVIM scales exponentially with the number of variables, we propose an estimator based on randomly sampling only $Theta(n)$ feature subsets given $n$ observations. We prove that our estimator converges at an asymptotically optimal rate. Moreover, by deriving the asymptotic distribution of our estimator, we construct valid confidence intervals and hypothesis tests. Our procedure has good finite-sample performance in simulations, and for an in-hospital mortality prediction task produces similar variable importance estimates when different machine learning algorithms are applied.
The Shapley value has become a popular method to attribute the prediction of a machine-learning model on an input to its base features. The use of the Shapley value is justified by citing [16] showing that it is the emph{unique} method that satisfies certain good properties (emph{axioms}). There are, however, a multiplicity of ways in which the Shapley value is operationalized in the attribution problem. These differ in how they reference the model, the training data, and the explanation context. These give very different results, rendering the uniqueness result meaningless. Furthermore, we find that previously proposed approaches can produce counterintuitive attributions in theory and in practice---for instance, they can assign non-zero attributions to features that are not even referenced by the model. In this paper, we use the axiomatic approach to study the differences between some of the many operationalizations of the Shapley value for attribution, and propose a technique called Baseline Shapley (BShap) that is backed by a proper uniqueness result. We also contrast BShap with Integrated Gradients, another extension of Shapley value to the continuous setting.