Towards User Guided Actionable Recourse

TL;DR

This paper introduces a gradient-based method for generating user-preferred actionable recourse in machine learning, incorporating user preferences as soft constraints to improve trust and transparency.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach to incorporate user preferences into actionable recourse generation using soft constraints and gradient-based optimization.

Findings

Effective incorporation of user preferences improves recourse relevance.

The method outperforms existing approaches in generating user-aligned recourse.

Extensive experiments validate the approach's effectiveness.

Abstract

Machine Learning's proliferation in critical fields such as healthcare, banking, and criminal justice has motivated the creation of tools which ensure trust and transparency in ML models. One such tool is Actionable Recourse (AR) for negatively impacted users. AR describes recommendations of cost-efficient changes to a user's actionable features to help them obtain favorable outcomes. Existing approaches for providing recourse optimize for properties such as proximity, sparsity, validity, and distance-based costs. However, an often-overlooked but crucial requirement for actionability is a consideration of User Preference to guide the recourse generation process. In this work, we attempt to capture user preferences via soft constraints in three simple forms: i) scoring continuous features, ii) bounding feature values and iii) ranking categorical features. Finally, we propose a gradient-based approach to identify User Preferred Actionable Recourse (UP-AR). We carried out extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of our approach.