Ceteris Paribus Plots – a new DALEX companion

If you like magical incantations in Data Science, please welcome the Ceteris Paribus Plots. Otherwise feel free to call them What-If Plots .

Ceteris Paribus (latin for all else unchanged ) Plots explain complex Machine Learning models around a single observation. They supplement tools like breakDown , Shapley values , LIME or LIVE. In addition to feature importance/feature attribution, now we can see how the model response changes along a specific variable, keeping all other variables unchanged.

How cancer-risk-scores change with age? How credit-scores change with salary? How insurance-costs change with age?

Well, use the ceterisParibus package to generate plots like the one below.

Here we have an explanation for a random forest model that predicts apartments prices. Presented profiles are prepared for a single observation marked with dashed lines (130m2 apartment on 3rd floor). From these profiles one can read how the model response is linked with particular variables.

Instead of original values on the OX scale one can plot qunatiles. This way one can put all variables in a single plot.

And once all variables are in the same scale, one can compare two or more models.