Many Faces of Feature Importance: Comparing Built-in and Post-hoc Feature Importance in Text Classification

Vivian Lai, Zheng Cai, Chenhao Tan


Abstract
Feature importance is commonly used to explain machine predictions. While feature importance can be derived from a machine learning model with a variety of methods, the consistency of feature importance via different methods remains understudied. In this work, we systematically compare feature importance from built-in mechanisms in a model such as attention values and post-hoc methods that approximate model behavior such as LIME. Using text classification as a testbed, we find that 1) no matter which method we use, important features from traditional models such as SVM and XGBoost are more similar with each other, than with deep learning models; 2) post-hoc methods tend to generate more similar important features for two models than built-in methods. We further demonstrate how such similarity varies across instances. Notably, important features do not always resemble each other better when two models agree on the predicted label than when they disagree.
Anthology ID:
D19-1046
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
486–495
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1046
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1046
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vivian Lai, Zheng Cai, and Chenhao Tan. 2019. Many Faces of Feature Importance: Comparing Built-in and Post-hoc Feature Importance in Text Classification. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 486–495, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Many Faces of Feature Importance: Comparing Built-in and Post-hoc Feature Importance in Text Classification (Lai et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1046.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1046.Attachment.pdf
Code
 BoulderDS/feature-importance
Data
SSTSST-5