Article,
Ranking variables and interactions using predictive uncertainty measures
(2019)cite arxiv:1910.07942.
Abstract
For complex nonlinear supervised learning models, assessing the relevance of
input variables or their interactions is not straightforward due to the lack of
a direct measure of relevance, such as the regression coefficients in
generalized linear models. One can assess the relevance of input variables
locally by using the mean prediction or its derivative, but this disregards the
predictive uncertainty. In this work, we present a Bayesian method for
identifying relevant input variables with main effects and interactions by
differentiating the Kullback-Leibler divergence of predictive distributions.
The method averages over local measures of relevance and has a conservative
property that takes into account the uncertainty in the predictive
distribution. Our empirical results on simulated and real data sets with
nonlinearities demonstrate accurate and efficient identification of relevant
main effects and interactions compared to alternative methods.
