Poster
Natural Counterfactuals With Necessary Backtracking
GUANG-YUAN HAO · Jiji Zhang · Biwei Huang · Hao Wang · Kun Zhang
West Ballroom A-D #5109
Counterfactual reasoning is pivotal in human cognition and especially important for providing explanations and making decisions. While Judea Pearl's influential approach is theoretically elegant, its generation of a counterfactual scenario often requires too much deviation from the observed scenarios to be feasible, as we show using simple examples. To mitigate this difficulty, we propose a framework of natural counterfactuals and a method for generating counterfactuals that are more feasible with respect to the actual data distribution. Our methodology incorporates a certain amount of backtracking when needed, allowing changes in causally preceding variables to minimize deviations from realistic scenarios. Specifically, we introduce a novel optimization framework that permits but also controls the extent of backtracking with a ``naturalness'' criterion. Empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Live content is unavailable. Log in and register to view live content