arXiv:2503.23111cs.LGcs.AI2025-03被引 5

提出基于扩展支持的SHAP聚合方法,确保小值特征可安全剔除

How to safely discard features based on aggregate SHAP values

  • 在特征分布的扩展支持上聚合SHAP值,避免误判无关特征
  • 证明当聚合值很小时,对应特征可安全移除,不损失模型性能
  • 适用于实际中常用的KernelSHAP,理论严谨且无需依赖近似精度

SHAP是主流的局部特征归因方法,常被用于全局分析:通过平均多个数据点的绝对SHAP值来计算全局特征重要性,进而剔除不重要特征。本文研究该做法的合理性,发现即使某特征的SHAP值在数据支撑集上为0,仍可能存在依赖关系。问题根源在于SHAP计算涉及数据外点,而函数可在这些点被设计以掩盖对特征的依赖。为此,我们建议在特征分布的边缘分布乘积构成的扩展支持上聚合SHAP值。在此基础上,证明小的聚合值意味着可安全丢弃该特征。进一步将结果拓展至最常用的核化SHAP(KernelSHAP),表明只要在扩展分布上计算,小值即可支持特征移除。该结论不依赖KernelSHAP对真实SHAP的逼近精度,是首个对KernelSHAP算法本身的理论刻画。研究还引入了Shapley李代数,提供代数视角,并证明随机打乱数据矩阵列可安全基于聚合值删特征。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

SHAP is one of the most popular local feature-attribution methods. Given a function f and an input x, it quantifies each feature's contribution to f(x). Recently, SHAP has been increasingly used for global insights: practitioners average the absolute SHAP values over many data points to compute global feature importance scores, which are then used to discard unimportant features. In this work, we investigate the soundness of this practice by asking whether small aggregate SHAP values necessarily imply that the corresponding feature does not affect the function. Unfortunately, the answer is no: even if the i-th SHAP value is 0 on the entire data support, there exist functions that clearly depend on Feature i. The issue is that computing SHAP values involves evaluating f on points outside of the data support, where f can be strategically designed to mask its dependence on Feature i. To address this, we propose to aggregate SHAP values over the extended support, which is the product of the marginals of the underlying distribution. With this modification, we show that a small aggregate SHAP value implies that we can safely discard the corresponding feature. We then extend our results to KernelSHAP, the most popular method to approximate SHAP values in practice. We show that if KernelSHAP is computed over the extended distribution, a small aggregate value justifies feature removal. This result holds independently of whether KernelSHAP accurately approximates true SHAP values, making it one of the first theoretical results to characterize the KernelSHAP algorithm itself. Our findings have both theoretical and practical implications. We introduce the Shapley Lie algebra, which offers algebraic insights that may enable a deeper investigation of SHAP and we show that randomly permuting each column of the data matrix enables safely discarding features based on aggregate SHAP and KernelSHAP values.

特征选择SHAP可解释性理论分析

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