Counterfactual Generators (id? generators_explanation)

Counterfactual generators form the very core of this package. The generator_catalogue can be used to inspect the available generators:

generator_catalogue

Dict{Symbol, Any} with 11 entries:
  :gravitational   => GravitationalGenerator
  :growing_spheres => GrowingSpheresGenerator
  :revise          => REVISEGenerator
  :clue            => CLUEGenerator
  :probe           => ProbeGenerator
  :dice            => DiCEGenerator
  :feature_tweak   => FeatureTweakGenerator
  :claproar        => ClaPROARGenerator
  :wachter         => WachterGenerator
  :generic         => GenericGenerator
  :greedy          => GreedyGenerator

The following sections provide brief descriptions of all of them.

Gradient-based Counterfactual Generators

At the time of writing, all generators are gradient-based: that is, counterfactuals are searched through gradient descent. In Altmeyer et al. (2023) we lay out a general methodological framework that can be applied to all of these generators:

\[\begin{aligned} \mathbf{s}^\prime &= \arg \min_{\mathbf{s}^\prime \in \mathcal{S}} \left\{ {\text{yloss}(M(f(\mathbf{s}^\prime)),y^*)}+ \lambda {\text{cost}(f(\mathbf{s}^\prime)) } \right\} \end{aligned} \]

“Here $\mathbf{s}^\prime=\left\{s_k^\prime\right\}_K$ is a $K$-dimensional array of counterfactual states and $f: \mathcal{S} \mapsto \mathcal{X}$ maps from the counterfactual state space to the feature space.” (Altmeyer et al. 2023)

For most generators, the state space is the feature space ($f$ is the identity function) and the number of counterfactuals $K$ is one. Latent Space generators instead search counterfactuals in some latent space $\mathcal{S}$. In this case, $f$ corresponds to the decoder part of the generative model, that is the function that maps back from the latent space to inputs.

References

Altmeyer, Patrick, Giovan Angela, Aleksander Buszydlik, Karol Dobiczek, Arie van Deursen, and Cynthia Liem. 2023. “Endogenous Macrodynamics in Algorithmic Recourse.” In First IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning.