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#1 Fast Estimation of Partial Dependence Functions using Trees [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Jinyang Liu, Tessa Steensgaard, Marvin N. Wright, Niklas Pfister, Munir Hiabu

Many existing interpretation methods are based on Partial Dependence (PD) functions that, for a pre-trained machine learning model, capture how a subset of the features affects the predictions by averaging over the remaining features. Notable methods include Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) which computes feature contributions based on a game theoretical interpretation and PD plots (i.e., 1-dim PD functions) that capture average marginal main effects. Recent work has connected these approaches using a functional decomposition and argues that SHAP values can be misleading since they merge main and interaction effects into a single local effect. However, a major advantage of SHAP compared to other PD-based interpretations has been the availability of fast estimation techniques, such as `TreeSHAP`. In this paper, we propose a new tree-based estimator, `FastPD`, which efficiently estimates arbitrary PD functions. We show that `FastPD` consistently estimates the desired population quantity -- in contrast to path-dependent `TreeSHAP` which is inconsistent when features are correlated. For moderately deep trees, `FastPD` improves the complexity of existing methods from quadratic to linear in the number of observations. By estimating PD functions for arbitrary feature subsets, `FastPD` can be used to extract PD-based interpretations such as SHAP, PD plots and higher-order interaction effects.

Subject: ICML.2025 - Poster