Causality-Based Feature Importance Quantifying Methods: PN-FI, PS-FI and PNS-FI

TL;DR

This paper introduces three causality-based feature importance measures—PN-FI, PS-FI, and PNS-FI—using probabilities of necessity, sufficiency, and their conjunction, validated through experiments on image features.

Contribution

It proposes novel causality-inspired feature importance metrics, integrating probabilistic causality concepts into feature selection for image tasks.

Findings

Feature importance bounds are tight intervals.

Dog eyes feature has the highest importance.

PNS and PN bounds are tighter than PS bounds.

Abstract

In the current ML field models are getting larger and more complex, and data used for model training are also getting larger in quantity and higher in dimensions. Therefore, in order to train better models, and save training time and computational resources, a good Feature Selection (FS) method in the preprocessing stage is necessary. Feature importance (FI) is of great importance since it is the basis of feature selection. Therefore, this paper creatively introduces the calculation of PN (the probability of Necessity), PN (the probability of Sufficiency), and PNS (the probability of Necessity and Sufficiency) of Causality into quantifying feature importance and creates 3 new FI measuring methods, PN-FI, which means how much importance a feature has in image recognition tasks, PS-FI that means how much importance a feature has in image generating tasks, and PNS-FI which measures both. The main body of this paper is three RCTs, with whose results we show how PS-FI, PN-FI, and PNS-FI of 3 features, dog nose, dog eyes, and dog mouth are calculated. The experiments show that firstly, FI values are intervals with tight upper and lower bounds. Secondly, the feature dog eyes has the most importance while the other two have almost the same. Thirdly, the bounds of PNS and PN are tighter than the bounds of PS.