# Ensemble of Counterfactual Explainers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.15194 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15194/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00399/) (2017)
- [A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01933/) (2018)
- [Explaining Machine Learning Classifiers through Diverse Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07697/) (2019)
- [Explanations based on the Missing: Towards Contrastive Explanations with Pertinent Negatives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07623/) (2018)
- [Interpretable Counterfactual Explanations Guided by Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02584/) (2019)
- [Good Counterfactuals and Where to Find Them: A Case-Based Technique for Generating Counterfactuals for Explainable AI (XAI)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13997/) (2020)
- [Optimal transport maps for distribution preserving operations on latent spaces of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.01970/) (2017)
- [FAT Forensics: A Python Toolbox for Implementing and Deploying Fairness, Accountability and Transparency Algorithms in Predictive Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03805/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [A multi-criteria approach for selecting an explanation from the set of counterfactuals produced by an ensemble of explainers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13940/) (2024)
- [T-COL: Generating Counterfactual Explanations for General User Preferences on Variable Machine Learning Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16146/) (2023)
- [Model-Free Counterfactual Subset Selection at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08326/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), several counterfactual explainers have been proposed, each focusing on some desirable properties of counterfactual instances: minimality, actionability, stability, diversity, plausibility, discriminative power. We propose an ensemble of counterfactual explainers that boosts weak explainers, which provide only a subset of such properties, to a powerful method covering all of them. The ensemble runs weak explainers on a sample of instances and of features, and it combines their results by exploiting a diversity-driven selection function. The method is model-agnostic and, through a wrapping approach based on autoencoders, it is also data-agnostic.