# CAGE: Causality-Aware Shapley Value for Global Explanations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11208 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11208/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [Causality for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10500/) (2019)
- [D'ya like DAGs? A Survey on Structure Learning and Causal Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02582/) (2021)
- [Explaining individual predictions when features are dependent: More accurate approximations to Shapley values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10464/) (2019)
- [Problems with Shapley-value-based explanations as feature importance measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11097/) (2020)
- [Feature relevance quantification in explainable AI: A causal problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13413/) (2019)
- [Improving KernelSHAP: Practical Shapley Value Estimation via Linear Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01536/) (2020)
- [Explaining Explanations in AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01439/) (2018)
- [Explainable AI (XAI): A Systematic Meta-Survey of Current Challenges and Future Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06420/) (2021)
- [What Do We Want From Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)? -- A Stakeholder Perspective on XAI and a Conceptual Model Guiding Interdisciplinary XAI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07817/) (2021)
- [Asymmetric Shapley values: incorporating causal knowledge into model-agnostic explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06358/) (2019)
- [Causal Shapley Values: Exploiting Causal Knowledge to Explain Individual Predictions of Complex Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01625/) (2020)
- [Shapley Flow: A Graph-based Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14592/) (2020)
- [Feature Removal Is a Unifying Principle for Model Explanation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03623/) (2020)
- [On the Logic of Causal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1304.2355/) (2013)
- [Axiomatic Aggregations of Abductive Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03131/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [On Measuring Intrinsic Causal Attributions in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09660/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having more influence on our everyday lives, it becomes important that AI-based decisions are transparent and explainable. As a consequence, the field of eXplainable AI (or XAI) has become popular in recent years. One way to explain AI models is to elucidate the predictive importance of the input features for the AI model in general, also referred to as global explanations. Inspired by cooperative game theory, Shapley values offer a convenient way for quantifying the feature importance as explanations. However many methods based on Shapley values are built on the assumption of feature independence and often overlook causal relations of the features which could impact their importance for the ML model. Inspired by studies of explanations at the local level, we propose CAGE (Causally-Aware Shapley Values for Global Explanations). In particular, we introduce a novel sampling procedure for out-coalition features that respects the causal relations of the input features. We derive a practical approach that incorporates causal knowledge into global explanation and offers the possibility to interpret the predictive feature importance considering their causal relation. We evaluate our method on synthetic data and real-world data. The explanations from our approach suggest that they are not only more intuitive but also more faithful compared to previous global explanation methods.