arXiv:2502.02786cs.LG2025-02中稿 · ICLR

个性化模型预测准了,解释却可能更难,需联合评估。

When Machine Learning Gets Personal: Evaluating Prediction and Explanation

  • 构建统一框架,量化个性化对预测与解释的影响
  • 发现预测不变时,解释性可能变差或变好
  • 揭示数据规模和属性数限制下效果无法检验的场景

在医疗等高风险领域,用户常期望分享个人信息能提升模型预测准确率并获得清晰解释。然而这一假设尚未被充分验证。本文提出一个统一框架,量化个性化对预测与解释的影响。结果表明,两者影响可能背离:预测不变时,解释性仍可变化。针对实际场景,研究了基于标准假设检验检测群体个性化效应的方法,推导出有限样本下错误概率的下界,其依赖于群体大小、个性化属性数量及预期收益。该结果提供可操作洞见,例如判断数据是否足以检验效应,或给定数据下最大可测效应。在真实表格数据集上应用该框架,结合特征归因方法,发现部分情形因数据统计特性而根本无法检验个性化效果。研究强调需联合评估个性化模型的预测与解释性能,并在设计模型与数据时确保足够信息支持评估。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

In high-stakes domains like healthcare, users often expect that sharing personal information with machine learning systems will yield tangible benefits, such as more accurate diagnoses and clearer explanations of contributing factors. However, the validity of this assumption remains largely unexplored. We propose a unified framework to quantify how personalizing a model influences both prediction and explanation. We show that its impacts on prediction and explanation can diverge: a model may become more or less explainable even when prediction is unchanged. For practical settings, we study a standard hypothesis test for detecting personalization effects on demographic groups. We derive a finite-sample lower bound on its probability of error as a function of group sizes, number of personal attributes, and desired benefit from personalization. This provides actionable insights, such as which dataset characteristics are necessary to test an effect, or the maximum effect that can be tested given a dataset. We apply our framework to real-world tabular datasets using feature-attribution methods, uncovering scenarios where effects are fundamentally untestable due to the dataset statistics. Our results highlight the need for joint evaluation of prediction and explanation in personalized models and the importance of designing models and datasets with sufficient information for such evaluation.

个性化模型预测解释数据评估机器学习可信度

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