GRANITE: A Generalized Regional Framework for Identifying Agreement in Feature-Based Explanations

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Authors: Julia Herbinger, Gabriel Laberge, Maximilian Muschalik, Yann Pequignot, Marvin N. Wright, Fabian Fumagalli
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Feature-based explanation methods aim to quantify how features influence the model's behavior, either locally or globally, but different methods often disagree, producing conflicting explanations. This disagreement arises primarily from two sources: how feature interactions are handled and how feature dependencies are incorporated. We propose GRANITE, a generalized regional explanation framework that partitions the feature space into regions where interaction and distribution influences are minimized. This approach aligns different explanation methods, yielding more consistent and interpretable explanations. GRANITE unifies existing regional approaches, extends them to feature groups, and introduces a recursive partitioning algorithm to estimate such regions. We demonstrate its effectiveness on real-world datasets, providing a practical tool for consistent and interpretable feature explanations.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) Software Testing and Debugging Techniques Data Mining Algorithms and Applications

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
30 January 2026
Document type
Preprint