FACE: Feasible and Actionable Counterfactual Explanations

Understand

Work in Counterfactual Explanations tends to focus on the principle of "the closest possible world" that identifies small changes leading to the desired outcome.

• In this paper we argue that while this approach might initially seem intuitively appealing it exhibits shortcomings not addressed in the current literature.
• First, a counterfactual example generated by the state-of-the-art systems is not necessarily representative of the underlying data distribution, and may therefore prescribe unachievable goals(e.g., an unsuccessful life insurance applicant with severe disability may be advised to do more sports).
• Secondly, the counterfactuals may not be based on a "feasible path" between the current state of the subject and the suggested one, making actionable recourse infeasible (e.g., low-skilled unsuccessful mortgage applicants may be told to double their salary, which may be hard without first increasing their skill level).