# Good Counterfactuals and Where to Find Them: A Case-Based Technique for Generating Counterfactuals for Explainable AI (XAI)

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.13997 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13997/

## Key facts

- Cited by 79 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 79)

- [If Only We Had Better Counterfactual Explanations: Five Key Deficits to Rectify in the Evaluation of Counterfactual XAI Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01035/) (2021)
- [NICE: An Algorithm for Nearest Instance Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07411/) (2021)
- [Counterfactuals and Causability in Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04244/) (2021)
- [Consistent Counterfactuals for Deep Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03109/) (2021)
- [On the Robustness of Sparse Counterfactual Explanations to Adverse Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09051/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Efficacy of Automatically Generated Counterfactuals for Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15231/) (2021)
- [Amortized Generation of Sequential Algorithmic Recourses for Black-box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03962/) (2021)
- [The privacy issue of counterfactual explanations: explanation linkage attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12051/) (2022)
- [Seamful XAI: Operationalizing Seamful Design in Explainable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06753/) (2022)
- [Even if Explanations: Prior Work, Desiderata & Benchmarks for Semi-Factual XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11970/) (2023)
- [A Few Good Counterfactuals: Generating Interpretable, Plausible and Diverse Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09056/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty Estimation and Out-of-Distribution Detection for Counterfactual Explanations: Pitfalls and Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09734/) (2021)
- [Features of Explainability: How users understand counterfactual and causal explanations for categorical and continuous features in XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10152/) (2022)
- [Adapting and Evaluating Influence-Estimation Methods for Gradient-Boosted Decision Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00359/) (2022)
- [DiCE4EL: Interpreting Process Predictions using a Milestone-Aware Counterfactual Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08697/) (2021)
- [Differentially Private Counterfactuals via Functional Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02878/) (2022)
- [Natural Example-Based Explainability: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03234/) (2023)
- [Counterfactual Explanations for Misclassified Images: How Human and Machine Explanations Differ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08733/) (2022)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Medical Applications: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01829/) (2024)
- [Generating Sparse Counterfactual Explanations For Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00931/) (2022)
- [Probabilistically Plausible Counterfactual Explanations with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17640/) (2024)
- [DisCERN:Discovering Counterfactual Explanations using Relevance Features from Neighbourhoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05800/) (2021)
- [Identifying Spurious Correlations and Correcting them with an Explanation-based Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08285/) (2022)
- [Algorithmic Factors Influencing Bias in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14014/) (2021)
- [GAM Coach: Towards Interactive and User-centered Algorithmic Recourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14165/) (2023)
- [Explaining Groups of Instances Counterfactually for XAI: A Use Case, Algorithm and User Study for Group-Counterfactuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09297/) (2023)
- [EXPLAIN, EDIT, GENERATE: Rationale-Sensitive Counterfactual Data Augmentation for Multi-hop Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14508/) (2023)
- [Explainability-Aware One Point Attack for Point Cloud Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04158/) (2021)
- [MCCE: Monte Carlo sampling of realistic counterfactual explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09790/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Instance-Centric Counterfactual Algorithms for XAI: From White Box to Black Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02399/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, a groundswell of research has identified the use of counterfactual explanations as a potentially significant solution to the Explainable AI (XAI) problem. It is argued that (a) technically, these counterfactual cases can be generated by permuting problem-features until a class change is found, (b) psychologically, they are much more causally informative than factual explanations, (c) legally, they are GDPR-compliant. However, there are issues around the finding of good counterfactuals using current techniques (e.g. sparsity and plausibility). We show that many commonly-used datasets appear to have few good counterfactuals for explanation purposes. So, we propose a new case based approach for generating counterfactuals using novel ideas about the counterfactual potential and explanatory coverage of a case-base. The new technique reuses patterns of good counterfactuals, present in a case-base, to generate analogous counterfactuals that can explain new problems and their solutions. Several experiments show how this technique can improve the counterfactual potential and explanatory coverage of case-bases that were previously found wanting.