Quadrature-TreeSHAP: Depth-Independent TreeSHAP and Shapley Interactions

TL;DR

Quadrature-TreeSHAP offers a numerically stable, depth-independent method for computing Shapley values and interactions in tree ensembles, significantly improving speed and stability over existing approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a quadrature-based reformulation of TreeSHAP that extends support to any-order interactions and enhances computational efficiency and stability.

Findings

Achieves greater numerical stability than TreeSHAP.

Faster computation of Shapley values and interactions on benchmarks.

Supports both CPU and GPU implementations with significant speedups.

Abstract

Shapley values are a standard tool for explaining predictions of tree ensembles, with Path-Dependent SHAP being the most widely used variant. Despite substantial progress, existing methods still exhibit trade-offs between depth-dependent runtime, numerical stability, and support for higher-order interactions. To address these challenges, we introduce Quadrature-TreeSHAP, a quadrature-based reformulation of Path-Dependent TreeSHAP that is numerically stable, naturally extends to any-order Shapley interaction values and is practically insensitive to tree depth. Our implementation supports both CPU and GPU and is integrated into XGBoost. Our method is based on a weighted-Banzhaf interaction polynomial, which expresses Banzhaf interaction values as expectations under a feature participation probability $p$. Shapley values and any-order interaction values are then recovered by integrating these polynomials over $p$ from 0 to 1. We evaluate these integrals using Gauss-Legendre quadrature, and show that, in practice, only 8 fixed quadrature points are sufficient to reach machine precision. In fact, Quadrature-TreeSHAP with 8 fixed points achieves greater numerical stability than TreeSHAP. This fixed-point formulation removes depth dependence from the inner computation and enables efficient SIMD execution. We confirm these advantages empirically. On 12 XGBoost benchmarks, Quadrature-TreeSHAP computes Shapley values 1.06x-10.59x faster than TreeSHAP on CPU and 1.84x-6.95x faster than GPUTreeSHAP on GPU. Shapley pairwise interactions are 3.80x-58.11x faster on CPU, with higher-order interactions achieving speedups of up to 1200x compared to TreeSHAP-IQ.