Persuasive contrastive explanations for Bayesian networks

Abstract

Explanation in Artificial Intelligence is often focused on providing reasons for why a model under consideration and its outcome are correct. Recently, research in explainable machine learning has initiated a shift in focus on including so-called counterfactual explanations. In this paper we propose to combine both types of explanation in the context of explaining Bayesian networks. To this end we introduce persuasive contrastive explanations that aim to provide an answer to the question Why outcome t instead of t′? posed by a user. In addition, we propose an algorithm for computing persuasive contrastive explanations. Both our definition of persuasive contrastive explanation and the proposed algorithm can be employed beyond the current scope of Bayesian networks.