Simple Steps to Success: A Method for Step-Based Counterfactual Explanations

Understand

Algorithmic recourse is a process that leverages counterfactual explanations, going beyond understanding why a system produced a given classification, to providing a user with actions they can take to change their predicted outcome.

• Existing approaches to compute such interventions -- known as recourse -- identify a set of points that satisfy some desiderata -- e.g.
• an intervention in the underlying causal graph, minimizing a cost function, etc.
• Satisfying these criteria, however, requires extensive knowledge of the underlying model structure, an often unrealistic amount of information in several domains.