Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Interactions – where are you?

    This question sends shivers down the poor modelers spine… The {hstats} R package introduced in our last post measures their strength using Friedman’s H-statistics, a collection of statistics based on partial dependence functions. On Github, the preview version of {hstats} 1.0.0 out – I will try to bring it to CRAN in about one week…

  • It’s the interactions

    What makes a ML model a black-box? It is the interactions. Without any interactions, the ML model is additive and can be exactly described. Studying interaction effects of ML models is challenging. The main XAI approaches are: This post is mainly about the third approach. Its beauty is that we get information about all interactions.…

  • Model Diagnostics in Python

    Version 1.0.0 of the new Python package for model-diagnostics was just released on PyPI.

  • Geographic SHAP

    “R Python” continued… Geographic SHAP

  • Quantiles And Their Estimation

    Applied statistics is dominated by the ubiquitous mean. For a change, this post is dedicated to quantiles. I will give my best to provide a good mix of theory and practical examples. While the mean describes only the central tendency of a distribution or random sample, quantiles are able to describe the whole distribution. They…

  • SHAP + XGBoost + Tidymodels = LOVE

    tidymodels and shapviz to explain XGBoost models

  • Dplyr-style without dplyr

    How to get “dplyr” feeling without “dplyr”

  • Interpret Complex Linear Models with SHAP within Seconds

    Peaking into richly parametrized linear models with SHAP? Yes!

  • Histograms, Gradient Boosted Trees, Group-By Queries and One-Hot Encoding

    This post shows how filling histograms can be done in very different ways thereby connecting very different areas: from gradient boosted trees to SQL queries to one-hot encoding. Let’s jump into it! Modern gradient boosted trees (GBT) like LightGBM, XGBoost and the HistGradientBoostingRegressor of scikit-learn all use two techniques on top of standard gradient boosting:…

  • The Unfairness of AI Fairness

    Fairness in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) is a recent and hot topic. As ML models are used in insurance pricing, the fairness topic also applies there. Just last month, Lindholm, Richman, Tsanakas and Wüthrich published a discussion paper on this subject that sheds new light on established AI fairness criteria. This post…

  • Kernel SHAP in R and Python

    “R Python” continued… Kernel SHAP

  • Kernel SHAP

    Standard Kernel SHAP has arrived in R. We show how well it plays together with deep learning in Keras

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