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iXGB: Improving the Interpretability of XGBoost using Decision Rules and Counterfactuals

Authors:

Mir Riyanul Islam, Mobyen Uddin Ahmed, Shahina Begum

Research group:

Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems

Publication Type:

Conference/Workshop Paper

Venue:

16th International Conference Agents and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Tree-ensemble models, such as Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), are renowned Machine Learning mod- els which have higher prediction accuracy. This higher accuracy, however, comes at the cost of reduced inter- pretability compared to traditional tree-based models. Also, the decision path or prediction rule of XGBoost is not explicit like the tree-based models. This paper proposes the iXGB – interpretable XGBoost, an approach to improve the interpretability of XGBoost. iXGB approximates a set of rules from the internal structure of XGBoost and the characteristics of the data. In addition, iXGB generates a set of counterfactuals from the neighbourhood of the test instances to support the understanding of the end-users on their operational rele- vance. The performance of iXGB in generating rule sets is evaluated with experiments on real and benchmark datasets which demonstrated reasonable interpretability. The evaluation result also supports that the inter- pretability of XGBoost can be improved without using surrogate methods.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Islam6864,
author = {Mir Riyanul Islam and Mobyen Uddin Ahmed and Shahina Begum},
title = {iXGB: Improving the Interpretability of XGBoost using Decision Rules and Counterfactuals},
month = {March},
year = {2024},
booktitle = {16th International Conference Agents and Artificial Intelligence},
url = {http://www.es.mdu.se/publications/6864-}
}