# Chapter 10 iBreakDown for Variable Attributions with Interactions

In the Section 9 we presented a model agnostic approach to additive decomposition of model predictions. We also showed that for non-additive moedls the proposed attribution depends on the ordering of variables.

Lack of additivness means, that effect of one variable is modulated by another variable(s). In such pair (or larger tuple) a single variable does not contribute independently, therefore in model explanations they should be presented together.

In this section we present an algorithm that identifies interactions between pairs of variables and include such interactions in variable decomposition plots. Here we present an algorithm for pairs of variables, but it can be easily generalized to larger number of variables.

## 10.1 Intuition

First, let’s see an example of an interaction between two variables. We will use real data from the Titanic dataset. Table 10.1 shows survival statistics for men on Titanic. For the sake of simplicity, in this example we consider only two variables - age and class. In the data age is a continuous variable, but again, for simplicity we have dychotomized it into two levels: boys (0-16 years old) and adults (17+ years old).

Suppose that we would like to explain factors that contribute to the survival of kids from the second class. As we can read, the survival for young passengers from 2nd class is 91.7% (survived 11 out of 12 male passengers in this group). It is higher than survival for men on titanic which is 20.5% (survived 352 out of 1716 men). So the question is, how age and class contribute to this higher survival?

Let us consider two explanations, that correspond to two different orderings:

• Overall men survival is 20.5%, but when we condition on male passengers from 2nd class the survival is even lower, i.e. 13.5%. Thus effect of the 2nd class is negative, it decreases the probability of survival by 7 percent points. Being a kid in the 2nd class is very lucky though. It changes of survival increase from 13.5% (male 2nd class) to 91.7% (boys from 2nd class). It’s an increase by 78.2 percent points. So the contributions are -7% for class and +78.2% for age.
• Overall men survival is 20.5%, but when we condition on young man then the survival is higher, i.e. 40.7%. Thus the effect of age is positive, being a boy increases the probability of survival by 20.2 percent points. Being a kid in 2nd class is even better, it changes the survival increase from 40.7% (boys) to 91.7% (boys from 2nd class). It’s an increase by 51 percent points. So the contributions are +51% for class and +20.2% for age.

As we see these two paths leads to two very different explanations. They differ not only in the size but also in the sign of attributed importance. It has happend because one variable modulate effect on the second variable as the moedl is not additive. Below we will show how to deal with such cases.

Table 10.1: Survival rates for men on Titanic. Ratios show how many survived in each Class/Age category.
Class / Age Kids (0-16) Adults (>16) Total
1st 5/5 = 100% 57/175 = 32.6% 62/180 = 34.4%
2nd 11/12 = 91.7% 13/166 = 7.8% 24/178 = 13.5%
3rd 17/61 = 27.9% 58/430 = 13.5% 75/491 = 15.3%
deck crew 43/66 = 65.2% 43/66 = 65.2%
engineering crew 71/324 = 21.9% 71/324 = 21.9%
restaurant staff 1/67 = 1.5% 1/67 = 1.5%
victualling crew 0/3 = 0% 76/407 = 18.7% 76/410 = 18.5%
Total 33/81 = 40.7% 319/1635 = 19.5% 352/1716 = 20.5%

The key intuition behind an iBreakDown algorithm is to include variable interactions to the visual explanations. To do this we need to identify some candidated for interactions. Here we propose a very simple algorithm that will do this in two steps.

1. First it will calculate variable contributions for each variable independently.
2. Second it will calculate joint effect for each pair of variables. If this effect is different than the sum of separate variables then such pair is identified as candidate for an interaction.

## 10.2 Method

Identification of interactions in the model is performed in three steps (Gosiewska and Biecek 2019a)

• Calculate a single-step contribution for each variable.
• Calculate a single-step contribution for every pair of variables. Subtract individual contributions to assess the size of non additivness.
• Order interaction effects and additive effects in a list to determin the final order for conditioning/explanations.

This simple intuition may be generalized into higher order interactions.

### 10.2.1 Single step contributions

For a feature $$x_i$$ we may define a single-step contribution as $\Delta^j = \mathbb{E}[f(x)|x^j = x_*^j] - \mathbb{E}[f(x)].$

The expected model prediction $$\mathbb{E}[f(x)]$$ is sometimes called baseline or intercept and may be denoted as $$\Delta_\varnothing$$.

Expected value $$\mathbb{E}[f(x)|x^j = x_*^j]$$ corresponds to an average prediction of a model $$f$$ if feature $$x_j$$ is fixed on $$x^j_*$$ coordinate from the observation to explain $$x_*$$.

I.e. the $$\Delta^j$$ is the difference between expected model response after conditioning on $$j$$ variable minus the expected model response. $$\Delta^j$$ measures a naive single-step local variable importance, it indicates how much the average prediction of model $$f$$ changes if feature $$x^j$$ is set on $$x_*^j$$.

### 10.2.2 Two steps contributions

For a pair of variables $$x_i$$, $$x_j$$ we introduce a single-step contribution as $\Delta^{ij} = \mathbb{E}[f(x)|x^i = x_*^i, x^j = x_*^j] - \mathbb{E}[f(x)].$

And non additive component of this contribution as

$\Delta_{I}^{ij} = \mathbb{E}[f(x)|x^i = x_*^i, x^j = x_*^j] - \mathbb{E}[f(x)|x^i = x_*^i] - \mathbb{E}[f(x)|x^j = x_*^j] + \mathbb{E}[f(x)].$

Or equivalently

$\Delta_{I}^{ij} = \Delta^{ij} - \Delta^i - \Delta^j.$

### 10.2.3 Sequential contributions

The $$\Delta_{I}^{ij}$$ is the difference between collective effect of variables $$x^i$$ and $$x^j$$ denoted as $$\Delta^{ij}$$ and their additive effects $$\Delta^{i}$$ and $$\Delta^{j}$$. Therefore, $$\Delta_{I}^{ij}$$ measures the importance of local lack-of-additivnes (aka. interaction) between features $$i$$ and $$j$$. For additive models $$\Delta_{I}^{ij}$$ should be small~for any $$i$$, $$j$$.

Note that contributions $$\Delta^{i}$$ do not sum to final model prediction. We only use them to determine the order of features in which the instance shall be explained. To calculate contributions that have the property of local accuracy we need to introduce one more symbol, that corresponds to the added contribution of feature $$i$$ to the set of features~$$J$$.

$\Delta^{i|J} = \mathbf{E}[f(X)| x^{J\cup\{i\}} = x^{J\cup\{i\}}_{*}] - \mathbf{E}[f(X)| x^{J} = x^{J}_{*}] = \Delta^{J\cup\{i\}} - \Delta^{J}.$

And for pairs of features

$\Delta^{ij|J} = \mathbf{E}[f(X)| x^{J\cup\{i,j\}} = x^{J\cup\{i,j\}}_{*}] - \mathbf{E}[f(X)| x^{J} = x^{J}_{*}] = \Delta^{J\cup\{i,j\}} - \Delta^{J}.$

Once the order of single-step importance is determined based on $$\Delta^i$$ and $$\Delta_{I}^{ij}$$ scores, the final explanation is the attribution to the sequence of $$\Delta^{i|J}$$ scores. These contributions sum up to the model predictions, because

$\Delta^{1,2...p} = f(x_*) - E[f(X)].$

This approach can be generalized to interactions between any number of variables.

The complexity of the calculation of single step attributions is $$O(p)$$ where $$p$$ stands for the number of variables, wile complexity for all pairs is $$O(p^2)$$. The complexity of the consecutive conditioning is $$O(p)$$, thus the complexity of whole algorithm is $$O(p^2)$$.

## 10.3 Example: Titanic

In this example we will use a random forest model for Titanic data and Johny D example - an 8 years old boy from 1st class.

In Table 10.2 we showed expected model responses $$\mathbb{E}[f(x)|x^i = x_*^i, x^j = x_*^j]$$, single-step effects $$\Delta^{ij}$$ and non-additive effects $$\Delta_{I}^{ij}$$ for each variable and each pair of variables. All these values are calculated locally for Johny D. These values are sorted along local importance, most important to the top.

Based on this ordering a following sequence of variables are indentified as informative: age, fare:class, gender. embarked, sibsp and parch.

Once the ordering is specified, in the table 10.3 we showed how the sequential attribution is calculated. These values are then presented in the iBreakDown plot 10.1.

Table 10.2: For each variable and each pair of variables we calculated the expected conditional model response, the difference between conditional model response and the baseline and for pairs of variables the non-additive contribution. Rows are sorted according to the absolute value of the last column (if provided).
Variable $$E[f(x):x^{ij}= x_*^{ij}]$$ $$\Delta^{ij}$$ $$\Delta_I^{ij}$$
age 0.505 0.270
fare:class 0.333 0.098 -0.231
class 0.420 0.185
fare:age 0.484 0.249 -0.164
fare 0.379 0.143
gender 0.110 -0.125
age:class 0.591 0.355 -0.100
age:gender 0.451 0.215 0.070
fare:gender 0.280 0.045 0.027
embarked 0.225 -0.011
embarked:age 0.504 0.269 0.010
parch:gender 0.100 -0.136 -0.008
sibsp 0.243 0.008
sibsp:age 0.520 0.284 0.007
sibsp:class 0.422 0.187 -0.006
embarked:fare 0.374 0.138 0.006
sibsp:gender 0.113 -0.123 -0.005
fare:parch 0.380 0.145 0.005
parch:sibsp 0.236 0.001 -0.004
parch 0.232 -0.003
parch:age 0.500 0.264 -0.002
embarked:gender 0.101 -0.134 0.002
embarked:parch 0.223 -0.012 0.001
fare:sibsp 0.387 0.152 0.001
embarked:class 0.409 0.173 -0.001
gender:class 0.296 0.061 0.001
embarked:sibsp 0.233 -0.002 0.001
parch:class 0.418 0.183 0.000
Table 10.3: Based on identified order we calculated the expected conditional model response and the difference between conditional model response with and without a specified variable. These values are plotted in the iBreakDown plot.
Variable $$\Delta^{i:J}$$ $$\Delta^{J\cup\{i\}}$$
intercept 0.235
age = 8 0.269 0.505
fare:class = 72:1st 0.039 0.544
gender = male -0.083 0.461
embarked = Southampton -0.002 0.458
sibsp = 0 -0.006 0.452
parch = 0 -0.030 0.422

## 10.4 Pros and cons

Break Down for interactions shares many features of Break Down for single variables. Below we summarize unique strengths and weaknesses of this approach.

Pros

• If interactions are present in the model, then additive contributions may be misleading. In such case the identification of interactions leads to better explanations.
• Complexity of Break Down Algorithm is quadratic, what is not that bad if number of features is small or moderate.

Cons

• For large number of variables, the consideration of all interactions is both time consuming and sensitive to noise as the number of pairs grow faster than number of variables.
• Identification of interaction is not based on significance testing, it’s purely based on absolute empirical effects, thus for small samples this procedure is prone to errors.

## 10.5 Code snippets for R

In this section we present key features of the iBreakDown package for R (Gosiewska and Biecek 2019a). This package covers all features presented in this chapter. It is available on CRAN and GitHub. Find more examples at the website of this package https://modeloriented.github.io/iBreakDown/.

All steps are very similar to these presented in the previouse chapter for variable attributions. The only difference is that the break_down() function will now take interactions = TRUE argument.

Model preparation

As in previous chapters we will use the random forest (Breiman et al. 2018) model titanic_rf_v6 developed for the Titanic dataset (see Section 4.1). Using the same model will help us (1) to understand how the Break Down method works, (2) to compare these explanations against methods presented in previous chapters.

So let restore the explain_rf_v6 explainer

library("randomForest")

library("DALEX")
johny_d
##   class gender age sibsp parch fare    embarked
## 1   1st   male   8     0     0   72 Southampton

The iBreakDown::break_down() function calculates Break Down contributions for a selected model around a selected observation.

The result from break_down() function is a data frame with additive attributions for selected observation.

The simplest use case is to set only the arguments - model explainers and observation of interest.

By default only additive attributions are calculated. Use interactions = TRUE argument to look for interactions.

library("iBreakDown")
bd_rf <- break_down(explain_rf_v6,
johny_d,
interactions = TRUE)

bd_rf
##                                          contribution
## Random Forest v6: intercept                     0.235
## Random Forest v6: age = 8                       0.270
## Random Forest v6: fare:class = 72:1st           0.039
## Random Forest v6: gender = male                -0.083
## Random Forest v6: embarked = Southampton       -0.003
## Random Forest v6: sibsp = 0                    -0.006
## Random Forest v6: parch = 0                    -0.030
## Random Forest v6: prediction                    0.422

The generic plot() function creates a Break Down plots.

plot(bd_rf) 

### References

Gosiewska, Alicja, and Przemyslaw Biecek. 2019a. “iBreakDown: Uncertainty of Model Explanations for Non-additive Predictive Models.” https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11420v1.

Breiman, Leo, Adele Cutler, Andy Liaw, and Matthew Wiener. 2018. RandomForest: Breiman and Cutler’s Random Forests for Classification and Regression. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=randomForest.