On Minimizing the Impact of Dataset Shifts on Actionable Explanations
Anna P. Meyer Dan Ley Suraj Srinivas Himabindu Lakkaraju
The Right to Explanation is an important regulatory principle that allows
individuals to request actionable explanations for algorithmic decisions.
However, several technical challenges arise when providing such actionable
explanations in practice. For instance, models are periodically retrained to
handle dataset shifts. This process may invalidate some of the previously
prescribed explanations, thus rendering them unactionable. But, it is unclear
if and when such invalidations occur, and what factors determine explanation
stability i.e., if an explanation remains unchanged amidst model retraining due
to dataset shifts. In this paper, we address the aforementioned gaps and
provide one of the first theoretical and empirical characterizations of the
factors influencing explanation stability. To this end, we conduct rigorous
theoretical analysis to demonstrate that model curvature, weight decay
parameters while training, and the magnitude of the dataset shift are key
factors that determine the extent of explanation (in)stability. Extensive
experimentation with real-world datasets not only validates our theoretical
results, but also demonstrates that the aforementioned factors dramatically
impact the stability of explanations produced by various state-of-the-art
methods.