Tracking systems are critical for air traffic control, as they provide aircraft trajectories to air controllers in real time. Therefore, the performance of these tracking systems must be carefully monitored to maintain traffic safety. Thales has thus developed a decision-making algorithm to precisely assess the quality of service (QoS) of tracking systems, by the aggregation of thirty metrics through a multi-criteria decision model. In particular, this QoS model provides a unique numeric value to quantify the tracking performance. The goal of this article is to show how to leverage sensitivity analysis to detect the specific metrics involved in a degradation of the QoS. The identification of the relevant metrics is a critical information for technical supervisors, who can then narrow their investigations to find the problem root causes, and ultimately restore an efficient tracking. Sensitivity analysis provides various methods to apportion the variability of a model output across the input variables, and thus identify the inputs with a strong impact on the QoS output. In particular, Shapley values have recently gain considerable momentum in the sensitivity analysis and machine learning communities as a powerful method to quantify the influence of input variables in correlated settings. Hence, we focus on a real dataset collected by Thales operational systems to show the efficiency of Shapley values. More precisely, we artificially introduce a random noise into the aircraft positions measured by the radars over a short time period, and show that Shapley values successfully identify the relevant metrics involved in the QoS degradation. Overall, this simulated analysis establishes a first level of demonstration of the approach efficiency to provide precise and useful information to the technical supervisor for the root cause identification of tracking problems.

Tree ensembles have demonstrated state-of-the-art predictive performance across a wide range of problems involving tabular data. Nevertheless, the black-box nature of tree ensembles is a strong limitation, especially for applications with critical decisions at stake. The Hoeffding or ANOVA functional decomposition is a powerful explainability method, as it breaks down black-box models into a unique sum of lower-dimensional functions, provided that input variables are independent. In standard learning settings, input variables are often dependent, and the Hoeffding decomposition is generalized through hierarchical orthogonality constraints. Such generalization leads to unique and sparse decompositions with well-defined main effects and interactions. However, the practical estimation of this decomposition from a data sample is still an open problem. Therefore, we introduce the TreeHFD algorithm to estimate the Hoeffding decomposition of a tree ensemble from a data sample. We show the convergence of TreeHFD, along with the main properties of orthogonality, sparsity, and causal variable selection. The high performance of TreeHFD is demonstrated through experiments on both simulated and real data, using our treehfd Python package (https://github.com/ThalesGroup/treehfd). Besides, we empirically show that the widely used TreeSHAP method, based on Shapley values, is strongly connected to the Hoeffding decomposition.

Distributional Random Forest (DRF) is a flexible forest-based method to estimate the full conditional distribution of a multivariate output of interest given input variables. In this article, we introduce a variable importance algorithm for DRFs, based on the well-established drop and relearn principle and MMD distance. While traditional importance measures only detect variables with an influence on the output mean, our algorithm detects variables impacting the output distribution more generally. We show that the introduced importance measure is consistent, exhibits high empirical performance on both real and simulated data, and outperforms competitors. In particular, our algorithm is highly efficient to select variables through recursive feature elimination, and can therefore provide small sets of variables to build accurate estimates of conditional output distributions.

Stein thinning is a promising algorithm proposed by (Riabiz et al., 2022) for post-processing outputs of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). The main principle is to greedily minimize the kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD), which only requires the gradient of the log-target distribution, and is thus well-suited for Bayesian inference. The main advantages of Stein thinning are the automatic remove of the burn-in period, the correction of the bias introduced by recent MCMC algorithms, and the asymptotic properties of convergence towards the target distribution. Nevertheless, Stein thinning suffers from several empirical pathologies, which may result in poor approximations, as observed in the literature. In this article, we conduct a theoretical analysis of these pathologies, to clearly identify the mechanisms at stake, and suggest improved strategies. Then, we introduce the regularized Stein thinning algorithm to alleviate the identified pathologies. Finally, theoretical guarantees and extensive experiments show the high efficiency of the proposed algorithm. An implementation of regularized Stein thinning as the kernax library in python and JAX is available at https://gitlab.com/drti/kernax.

Interpretability of learning algorithms is crucial for applications involving critical decisions, and variable importance is one of the main interpretation tools. Shapley effects are now widely used to interpret both tree ensembles and neural networks, as they can efficiently handle dependence and interactions in the data, as opposed to most other variable importance measures. However, estimating Shapley effects is a challenging task, because of the computational complexity and the conditional expectation estimates. Accordingly, existing Shapley algorithms have flaws: a costly running time, or a bias when input variables are dependent. Therefore, we introduce SHAFF, SHApley eFfects via random Forests, a fast and accurate Shapley effect estimate, even when input variables are dependent. We show SHAFF efficiency through both a theoretical analysis of its consistency, and the practical performance improvements over competitors with extensive experiments. An implementation of SHAFF in C++ and R is available online.

We introduce SIRUS (Stable and Interpretable RUle Set) for regression, a stable rule learning algorithm, which takes the form of a short and simple list of rules. State-of-the-art learning algorithms are often referred to as “black boxes” because of the high number of operations involved in their prediction process. Despite their powerful predictivity, this lack of interpretability may be highly restrictive for applications with critical decisions at stake. On the other hand, algorithms with a simple structure—typically decision trees, rule algorithms, or sparse linear models—are well known for their instability. This undesirable feature makes the conclusions of the data analysis unreliable and turns out to be a strong operational limitation. This motivates the design of SIRUS, based on random forests, which combines a simple structure, a remarkable stable behavior when data is perturbed, and an accuracy comparable to its competitors. We demonstrate the efficiency of the method both empirically (through experiments) and theoretically (with the proof of its asymptotic stability). A R/C++ software implementation sirus is available from CRAN.