In this paper we suggest NICE: a new algorithm to generate counterfactual explanations for heterogeneous tabular data. The design of our algorithm specifically takes into account algorithmic requirements that often emerge in real-life deployments: the ability to provide an explanation for all predictions, being efficient in run-time, and being able to handle any classification model (also non-differentiable ones). More specifically, our approach exploits information from a nearest instance tospeed up the search process. We propose four versions of NICE, where three of them optimize the explanations for one of the following properties: sparsity, proximity or plausibility. An extensive empirical comparison on 10 datasets shows that our algorithm performs better on all properties than the current state-of-the-art. These analyses show a trade-off between on the one hand plausiblity and on the other hand proximity or sparsity, with our different optimization methods offering the choice to select the preferred trade-off. An open-source implementation of NICE can be found at https://github.com/ADMAntwerp/NICE.

Climate change poses a major challenge to humanity, especially in its impact on agriculture, a challenge that a responsible AI should meet. In this paper, we examine a CBR system (PBI-CBR) designed to aid sustainable dairy farming by supporting grassland management, through accurate crop growth prediction. As climate changes, PBI-CBR's historical cases become less useful in predicting future grass growth. Hence, we extend PBI-CBR using data augmentation, to specifically handle disruptive climate events, using a counterfactual method (from XAI). Study 1 shows that historical, extreme climate-events (climate outlier cases) tend to be used by PBI-CBR to predict grass growth during climate disrupted periods. Study 2 shows that synthetic outliers, generated as counterfactuals on a outlier-boundary, improve the predictive accuracy of PBI-CBR, during the drought of 2018. This study also shows that an instance-based counterfactual method does better than a benchmark, constraint-guided method.

Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is an artificial intelligence approach to problem-solving with a good record of success. This article proposes using Quantum Computing to improve some of the key processes of CBR defining so a Quantum Case-Based Reasoning (qCBR) paradigm. The focus is set on designing and implementing a qCBR based on the variational principle that improves its classical counterpart in terms of average accuracy, scalability and tolerance to overlapping. A comparative study of the proposed qCBR with a classic CBR is performed for the case of the Social Workers' Problem as a sample of a combinatorial optimization problem with overlapping. The algorithm's quantum feasibility is modelled with docplex and tested on IBMQ computers, and experimented on the Qibo framework.

Imbalanced datasets are a special case for classification problem where the class distribution is not uniform among the classes. One of the techniques to handle imbalance datasets is data sampling. Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) is an oversampling technique that generates synthetic samples from the minority class to match the majority class. It is used to obtain a synthetically class-balanced or nearly class-balanced training set. SMOTE works by selecting examples that are close in the feature space, drawing a line between the examples in the feature space and drawing a new sample at a point along that line.

I'm talking about the demise of the popular KNN algorithm that is taught in pretty much every Data Science course! Read on to find out what's replacing this staple in every Data Scientists' toolkit. Finding "K" similar items to any given item is widely known in the machine learning community as a "similarity" search or "nearest neighbor" (NN) search. The most widely known NN search algorithm is the K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN) algorithm. In KNN, given a collection of objects like an e-commerce catalog of handphones, we can find a small number (K) nearest neighbors from this entire catalog for any new search query.

Importance weighting is widely applicable in machine learning in general and in techniques dealing with data covariate shift problems in particular. A novel, direct approach to determine such importance weighting is presented. It relies on a nearest neighbor classification scheme and is relatively straightforward to implement. Comparative experiments on various classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our so-called nearest neighbor weighting (NNeW) scheme. Considering its performance, our procedure can act as a simple and effective baseline method for importance weighting.

Stroke currently ranks as the second most common cause of death and the second most common cause of disability worldwide. Motor deficits of the upper extremity (hemiparesis) are the most common and debilitating consequences of stroke, affecting around 80% of patients. These deficits limit the accomplishment of daily activities, affect social participation, are the origin of significant emotional distress, and cause profound detrimental effects on quality of life. Stroke rehabilitation aims to improve and maintain functional ability through restitution, substitution and compensation of functions. The restoration of motor deficits and improvements in motor function typically occurs during the first months following a stroke and therefore, major efforts are devoted to this acute stage.

Counterfactual explanations provide a potentially significant solution to the Explainable AI (XAI) problem, but good, native counterfactuals have been shown to rarely occur in most datasets. Hence, the most popular methods generate synthetic counterfactuals using blind perturbation. However, such methods have several shortcomings: the resulting counterfactuals (i) may not be valid data-points (they often use features that do not naturally occur), (ii) may lack the sparsity of good counterfactuals (if they modify too many features), and (iii) may lack diversity (if the generated counterfactuals are minimal variants of one another). We describe a method designed to overcome these problems, one that adapts native counterfactuals in the original dataset, to generate sparse, diverse synthetic counterfactuals from naturally occurring features. A series of experiments are reported that systematically explore parametric variations of this novel method on common datasets to establish the conditions for optimal performance.

Who are the Grip2u Phone Cases for? Cell phones are expensive, delicate devices and nobody knows that better than cell phone case manufacturer Grip2u. Their entire line of products is dedicated to protecting cell phones while also making them easier to use thanks to the signature band found on the back of the case. So how does a Grip2u case compare to a standard cell phone case? We looked at two different Grip2u models, the Boost and Slim, and compared them to a very basic case using an iPhone XR.

We participated in the two case law tasks, i.e., the legal case retrieval task and the legal case entailment task. Task 1 (the retrieval task) aims to automatically identify supporting cases from the case law corpus given a new case, and Task 2 (the entailment task) to identify specific paragraphs that entail the decision of a new case in a relevant case. In both tasks, we employed the neural models for semantic understanding and the traditional retrieval models for exact matching. As a result, our team ("TLIR") ranked 2nd among all of the teams in Task 1 and 3rd among teams in Task 2. Experimental results suggest that combing models of semantic understanding and exact matching benefits the legal case retrieval task while the legal case entailment task relies more on semantic understanding.