Justification in Case-Based Reasoning

Abstract

The explanation and justification of decisions is an important subject in contemporary data-driven automated methods. Case-based argumentation has been proposed as the formal background for the explanation of data-driven automated decision making. In particular, a method was developed in recent work based on the theory of precedential constraint which reasons from a case base, given by the training data of the machine learning system, to produce a justification for the outcome of a focus case. An important role is played in this method by the notions of citability and compensation, and in the present work we develop these in more detail. Special attention is paid to the notion of compensation; we formally specify the notion and identify several of its desirable properties. These considerations reveal a refined formal perspective on the explanation method as an extension of the theory of precedential constraint with a formal notion of justification.