Leaf Values as Coordinates: Exact Contrastive Explanation for Gradient-Boosted Ensembles
A gradient-boosted ensemble predicts by summing one leaf value per tree. Read those values as coordinates rather than as intermediate results, and every instance becomes a point in R^M on which the model acts linearly: the score is the sum of the coordinates. This small change of view makes contrastive explanation exact. The difference between two instances is a vector that is identically zero wherever they share a leaf, so the gap between a rejected applicant and an accepted one is carried by a handful of coordinates, each traceable to a real split in a real tree. Nothing is fitted, sampled, or assumed additive in features -- the additivity is already there, in the right space. We build ...
| Authors | Emanuele Luzio |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 19 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 August 2026 |
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