~/talk

Rethinking Feature Importance-Evaluating SHAP & TreeSHAP for Tree-Based MLM

Talkat PyData Boston 2025 · 2025-12-08..12-10· [machine-learning, testing]
name:Gao
links:none on file
slides:none on file

Compares SHAP’s assumptions and practical limits with concrete experiments on XGBoost LightGBM CatBoost models, showing kernel SHAP’s sensitivity to label encoding and class imbalance and TreeSHAP’s exact, much faster computation; kernel SHAP can take 2 hours vs 5 minutes for TreeSHAP on the same tree ensemble, and TreeSHAP yields tighter clustering and greater run-to-run stability across IBM HR (1k rows), Kaggle credit (150k), and UCI Adult (48k) datasets, while high‑cardinality categoricals and preprocessing still produce misleading attributions so kernel SHAP vs TreeSHAP requires careful preprocessing.

AI-written summary · about

  1. 0:00Feature importance and SHAP
  2. 3:38SHAP with Minions example
  3. 6:53SHAP assumptions and limits
  4. 8:59TreeSHAP for trees
  5. 9:44Tree-based ML models
  6. 11:08TreeSHAP exact SHAP values
  7. 13:11HR workforce case study
  8. 17:24SHAP vs TreeSHAP on HR data
  9. 21:36Finance credit scoring case
  10. 23:42Income data social science
  11. 26:11KernelSHAP vs TreeSHAP
  12. 27:35Model interpretability takeaways
  13. 29:00Q&A on TreeSHAP stability
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