While preference modelling is becoming one of the pillars of machine learning, the problem of preference explanation remains challenging and underexplored. In this paper, we propose \textsc{ Pref-SHAP}, a Shapley value-based model explanation framework for pairwise comparison data. We derive the appropriate value functions for preference models and further extend the framework to model and explain \emph{ context specific} information, such as the surface type in a tennis game. To demonstrate the utility of \textsc{ Pref-SHAP}, we apply our method to a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets and show that richer and more insightful explanations can be obtained over the baseline.
Categories: stat.ML cs.LG stat.ME