arXiv:2609.04177cs.AI2026-09

提出可计算的因果解释框架,让复杂模型也能给出有理论依据的归因分析。

A Computationally Feasible Framework for Causal Probabilistic Explanation

论文配图:A Computationally Feasible Framework for Causal Probabilistic Explanation
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 将因果解释转化为概率模型中的可近似估计问题
  • 在百万级数据模型上验证了方法的可扩展性与一致性
  • 适用于动态系统和真实部署模型,兼具理论严谨性与实用性

解释特定结果为何发生、哪些输入应被归责或归功,是哲学、科学与政策分析的核心。现有工具分属两派:实际因果理论(AC)虽有理论基础,但仅适用于小型模型,因需枚举反事实情形;而可扩展的归因方法如SHAP甚至因果SHAP,至少部分忽略数据生成的因果结构,可能导致与严谨因果分析冲突。本文提出概率因果影响(PCI),基于实际因果与佩尔的必要性/充分性概率概念,将解释问题重构为可在概率因果模型上通过蒙特卡洛近似的估计问题。通过定义‘候选解释’分布、反事实值分布及评分函数,PCI 提供可计算、因果根基明确的分级解释,退化为AC与佩尔因果概率的特例。我们在合成数据与真实世界案例中评估,涵盖与AC的一致性检验、可扩展性实验、复杂连续动态系统以及训练于百万数据点的真实部署因果机器学习模型。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Explaining why a specific outcome occurred, and which inputs deserve the blame or credit, is central to philosophical, scientific, and policy analysis. Existing tools split into two camps. The theory of actual causality (AC) gives principled verdicts, but only for toy-sized models, because computing them requires enumerating counterfactual scenarios. Scalable attribution methods like SHAP (or even causal SHAP) at least partially ignore the causal structure that generated the data, and can give answers that conflict with a careful causal analysis. We close this gap with Probabilistic Causal Impact (PCI). PCI builds on actual causality and on Pearl's notions of probability of necessity and sufficiency, but recasts the question of explainability as an estimation problem on a probabilistic causal model that is easily approximated via Monte Carlo. By specifying a distribution over "candidate explanations," a distribution over counterfactual values, and a scoring function, PCI provides tractable, causally grounded, graded explanations, generalizing AC and Pearl's probability of causation as degenerate cases. We evaluate PCI in synthetic and real-world examples, spanning consistency checks with AC, scaling experiments, complex continuous-valued dynamical systems, and a real-world deployed causal machine learning model trained on millions of datapoints.

因果解释可扩展性概率模型

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