What is different between these datasets?

Zhicheng Guo, Varun Babbar, Cynthia Rudin

Abstract: The performance of machine learning models relies heavily on the quality of input data, yet real-world applications often face significant data-related challenges. A common issue arises when curating training data or deploying models: two datasets from the same domain may exhibit differing distributions. While many techniques exist for detecting such distribution shifts, there is a lack of comprehensive methods to explain these differences in a human-understandable way beyond opaque quantitative metrics. To bridge this gap, we propose a versatile toolbox of interpretable methods for comparing datasets. Using a variety of case studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across diverse data modalities -- including tabular data, text data, images, time series signals -- in both low and high-dimensional settings. These methods complement existing techniques by providing actionable and interpretable insights to better understand and address distribution shifts.