The complexity of state-of-the-art modeling techniques for image classification impedes the ability to explain model predictions in an interpretable way. A counterfactual explanation highlights the parts of an image which, when removed, would change the predicted class. Both legal scholars and data scientists are increasingly turning to counterfactual explanations as these provide a high degree of human interpretability, reveal what minimal information needs to be changed in order to come to a different prediction and do not require the prediction model to be disclosed. Our literature review shows that existing counterfactual methods for image classification have strong requirements regarding access to the training data and the model internals, which often are unrealistic. Therefore, SEDC is introduced as a model-agnostic instance-level explanation method for image classification that does not need access to the training data. As image classification tasks are typically multiclass problems, an additional contribution is the introduction of the SEDC-T method that allows specifying a target counterfactual class. These methods are experimentally tested on ImageNet data, and with concrete examples, we illustrate how the resulting explanations can give insights in model decisions. Moreover, SEDC is benchmarked against existing model-agnostic explanation methods, demonstrating stability of results, computational efficiency and the counterfactual nature of the explanations.

In this paper we suggest NICE: a new algorithm to generate counterfactual explanations for heterogeneous tabular data. The design of our algorithm specifically takes into account algorithmic requirements that often emerge in real-life deployments: the ability to provide an explanation for all predictions, being efficient in run-time, and being able to handle any classification model (also nondifferentiable ones). More specifically, our approach exploits information from a nearest instance to speed up the search process. We propose four versions of NICE, where three of them optimize the explanations for one of the following properties: sparsity, proximity or plausibility. An extensive empirical comparison on 10 datasets shows that our algorithm performs better on all properties than the current state-of-the-art. These analyses show a trade-off between on the one hand plausiblity and on the other hand proximity or sparsity, with our different optimization methods offering the choice to select the preferred trade-off. An open-source implementation of NICE can be found at https://github.com/ADMAntwerp/NICE.

In this paper we propose a new algorithm, named NICE, to generate counterfactual explanations for tabular data that specifically takes into account algorithmic requirements that often emerge in real-life deployments: (1) the ability to provide an explanation for all predictions, (2) being able to handle any classification model (also non-differentiable ones), (3) being efficient in run time, and (4) providing multiple counterfactual explanations with different characteristics. More specifically, our approach exploits information from a nearest unlike neighbor to speed up the search process, by iteratively introducing feature values from this neighbor in the instance to be explained. We propose four versions of NICE, one without optimization and, three which optimize the explanations for one of the following properties: sparsity, proximity or plausibility. An extensive empirical comparison on 40 datasets shows that our algorithm outperforms the current state-of-the-art in terms of these criteria. Our analyses show a trade-off between on the one hand plausibility and on the other hand proximity or sparsity, with our different optimization methods offering users the choice to select the types of counterfactuals that they prefer. An open-source implementation of NICE can be found at https://github.com/ADMAntwerp/NICE.