학술논문

Rule-Guided Counterfactual Explainable Recommendation
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on. 36(5):2179-2190 May, 2024
Subject
Computing and Processing
Recommender systems
Predictive models
Perturbation methods
Feature extraction
Frequency modulation
Decision trees
Correlation
Counterfactual explanation
explainable model
interpretable model
recommender system
Language
ISSN
1041-4347
1558-2191
2326-3865
Abstract
To empower the trust of current recommender systems, the counterfactual explanation (CE) method is adopted to generate the counterfactual instance for each input and take their changes causing the different outcomes as the explanation. Although promising results have been achieved by existing CE-based methods, we propose to generate the attribute-oriented counterfactual explanation. Different from them, we aim to generate the counterfactual instance by performing the intervention on the attributes, and then build an attribute-oriented counterfactual explainable recommender system. Considering the correlation and categorical values of attributes, how to efficiently generate the reliable counterfactual instances on the attributes challenges us. To alleviate such a problem, we propose to extract the decision rules over the attributes to guide the attribute-oriented counterfactual generation. Specifically, we adopt the gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) to pre-build the decision rules over the attributes and develop a Rule-guided Counterfactual Explainable Recommendation model ( RCER ) to predict the user-item interaction and generate the counterfactual instances for the user-item pairs. We finally conduct extensive experiments on four publicly datasets, including NYC, LON, Amazon, and Movielens datasets. Experimental results have qualitatively and quantitatively justified the superiority of our model over existing cutting-edge baselines.