On Contrastive Explanations for Tree-Based Classifiers

We define contrastive explanations that are suited to tree-based classifiers. In our framework, contrastive explanations are based on the set of (possibly non-independent) Boolean characteristics used by the classifier and are at least as general as contrastive explanations based on the set of characteristics of the instances considered at start. We investigate the computational complexity of computing contrastive explanations for any Boolean classifier (including tree-based ones), when the Boolean conditions used are not independent. Finally, we present and evaluate empirically an algorithm for computing minimum-size contrastive explanations for random forests.