首次统一时间序列聚类的局部与全局反事实解释,让模型决策更可懂。
GALACTIC: Global and Local Agnostic Counterfactuals for Time-series Clustering
- 基于聚类感知优化生成最小扰动,实现个体实例的反事实解释。
- 用最小描述长度提取非冗余全局解释,压缩总结跨簇转变模式。
- 适合需要理解聚类结果动态变化的研究者和工业应用者。
时间序列聚类是模式发现的基础工具,但现有可解释性方法主要依赖特征归因或元数据,无法识别使实例跨越聚类边界的关键转变。反事实解释(CE)能找出最小的时间扰动以改变模型预测,但以往多局限于有监督场景。本文提出GALACTIC,首个统一的无监督时间序列聚类反事实解释框架。在实例级(局部),通过聚类感知优化目标生成扰动,尊重目标与底层聚类分配;在聚类级(全局),为减轻认知负荷并提升可解释性,提出代表性反事实选择问题,采用最小描述长度(MDL)目标提取非冗余的全局解释,刻画簇间转换特征。证明了该MDL目标为超模函数,可转化为单调子模集函数,从而设计出具有(1-1/e)近似保证的高效贪心算法。在UCR Archive上的大量实验表明,GALACTIC生成的局部反事实更稀疏,全局摘要更简洁,优于适配后的最先进基线,首次实现了通过反事实统一解释聚类时间序列。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Time-series clustering is a fundamental tool for pattern discovery, yet existing explainability methods, primarily based on feature attribution or metadata, fail to identify the transitions that move an instance across cluster boundaries. While Counterfactual Explanations (CEs) identify the minimal temporal perturbations required to alter the prediction of a model, they have been mostly confined to supervised settings. This paper introduces GALACTIC, the first unified framework to bridge local and global counterfactual explainability for unsupervised time-series clustering. At instance level (local), GALACTIC generates perturbations via a cluster-aware optimization objective that respects the target and underlying cluster assignments. At cluster level (global), to mitigate cognitive load and enhance interpretability, we formulate a representative CE selection problem. We propose a Minimum Description Length (MDL) objective to extract a non-redundant summary of global explanations that characterize the transitions between clusters. We prove that our MDL objective is supermodular, which allows the corresponding MDL reduction to be framed as a monotone submodular set function. This enables an efficient greedy selection algorithm with provable $(1-1/e)$ approximation guarantees. Extensive experimental evaluation on the UCR Archive demonstrates that GALACTIC produces significantly sparser local CEs and more concise global summaries than state-of-the-art baselines adapted for our problem, offering the first unified approach for interpreting clustered time-series through counterfactuals.
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