Counterfactual Machine Learning
March 30, 2025
I’ll begin by discussing counterfactuals example. Suppose we have a machine learning model that predicts the likelihood of a patient developing diabetes, with one of its features is the patient’s glucose level. In this scenario, the model predicts that a patient has a high likelihood of developing diabetes, based on their glucose level. Now we may wonder what glucose level would be required for the prediction to change to not indicate diabetes. To answer this question, we can run a counterfactual analysis using the machine learning model, where we simulate changing the patient’s glucose level and observe how this affects the prediction. So, with this example, we can see that counterfactual can be used for interpreting (its not casual relationship) model prediction for specific instance.
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