Causal Dependence Plots

Neural Information Processing Systems 

To use artificial intelligence and machine learning models wisely we must understand how they interact with the world, including how they depend causally on data inputs. In this work we develop Causal Dependence Plots (CDPs) to visualize how a model's predicted outcome depends on changes in a given predictor along with consequent causal changes in other predictor variables. Crucially, this differs from standard methods based on independence or holding other predictors constant, such as regression coefficients or Partial Dependence Plots (PDPs).