Explaining Preferences with Shapley Values

Robert Hu, Siu Lun Chau, Jaime Ferrando Huertas, Dino Sejdinovic

Keywords: Interpretability, Preference Learning, Kernel, Shapley Values, RKHS

TL;DR: We propose Pref-SHAP to explain Preference Learning, even when data is not rankable

Abstract: While preference modelling is becoming one of the pillars of machine learning, the problem of preference explanation remains challenging and underexplored. In this paper, we propose \textsc{Pref-SHAP}, a Shapley value-based model explanation framework for pairwise comparison data. We derive the appropriate value functions for preference models and further extend the framework to model and explain \emph{context specific} information, such as the surface type in a tennis game. To demonstrate the utility of \textsc{Pref-SHAP}, we apply our method to a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets and show that richer and more insightful explanations can be obtained over the baseline.

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/explaining-preferences-with-shapley-values/code)