arXiv:2503.22389cs.LG2025-03被引 7

为时间序列模型生成可解释的反事实样本,提升理解力与可用性。

MASCOTS: Model-Agnostic Symbolic COunterfactual explanations for Time Series

  • 基于符号化特征空间生成反事实,不依赖具体模型结构。
  • 在基准数据集上验证有效性、接近性与合理性,解释更简洁清晰。
  • 适合需要直观理解模型决策的医疗、金融等领域用户。

反事实解释通过识别最小变化来改变预测结果,提供直观的模型决策理解方式。然而,由于时间序列存在时间依赖性、高维性和缺乏直观的人类可读表示,将其应用于时间序列模型仍具挑战。我们提出MASCOTS,结合袋式感受野表示与受符号聚合近似启发的符号变换,在符号特征空间中操作,既保持原始数据和模型的保真度,又显著提升可解释性。与依赖模型结构或基于自编码器采样的方法不同,MASCOTS以模型无关方式直接生成有意义且多样化的反事实样本,适用于单变量与多变量数据。我们在单变量与多变量基准数据集上评估该方法,结果表明其在有效性、接近性和合理性方面与当前最优方法相当,同时大幅提高可解释性与稀疏性。其符号特性支持视觉化、自然语言或语义表示,使反事实推理更具可访问性与行动力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Counterfactual explanations provide an intuitive way to understand model decisions by identifying minimal changes required to alter an outcome. However, applying counterfactual methods to time series models remains challenging due to temporal dependencies, high dimensionality, and the lack of an intuitive human-interpretable representation. We introduce MASCOTS, a method that leverages the Bag-of-Receptive-Fields representation alongside symbolic transformations inspired by Symbolic Aggregate Approximation. By operating in a symbolic feature space, it enhances interpretability while preserving fidelity to the original data and model. Unlike existing approaches that either depend on model structure or autoencoder-based sampling, MASCOTS directly generates meaningful and diverse counterfactual observations in a model-agnostic manner, operating on both univariate and multivariate data. We evaluate MASCOTS on univariate and multivariate benchmark datasets, demonstrating comparable validity, proximity, and plausibility to state-of-the-art methods, while significantly improving interpretability and sparsity. Its symbolic nature allows for explanations that can be expressed visually, in natural language, or through semantic representations, making counterfactual reasoning more accessible and actionable.

时间序列反事实解释可解释性符号化

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