On Explaining Random Forests with SAT

On Explaining Random Forests with SAT

Yacine Izza, Joao Marques-Silva

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2584-2591. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/356

Random Forest (RFs) are among the most widely used Machine Learning (ML) classifiers. Even though RFs are not interpretable, there are no dedicated non-heuristic approaches for computing explanations of RFs. Moreover, there is recent work on polynomial algorithms for explaining ML models, including naive Bayes classifiers. Hence, one question is whether finding explanations of RFs can be solved in polynomial time. This paper answers this question negatively, by proving that computing one PI-explanation of an RF is D^P-hard. Furthermore, the paper proposes a propositional encoding for computing explanations of RFs, thus enabling finding PI-explanations with a SAT solver. This contrasts with earlier work on explaining boosted trees (BTs) and neural networks (NNs), which requires encodings based on SMT/MILP. Experimental results, obtained on a wide range of publicly available datasets, demonstrate that the proposed SAT-based approach scales to RFs of sizes common in practical applications. Perhaps more importantly, the experimental results demonstrate that, for the vast majority of examples considered, the SAT-based approach proposed in this paper significantly outperforms existing heuristic approaches.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Explainable/Interpretable Machine Learning
Constraints and SAT: Constraints and Data Mining; Constraints and Machine Learning
Constraints and SAT: SAT: Solvers and Applications