# MCCE: Missingness-aware Causal Concept Explainer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09639 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09639/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [Null It Out: Guarding Protected Attributes by Iterative Nullspace Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07667/) (2020)
- [Post-hoc Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15480/) (2022)
- [Probabilistic Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01574/) (2023)
- [Concept-based Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12936/) (2023)
- [Concept Embedding Models: Beyond the Accuracy-Explainability Trade-Off](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09056/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Role of Gradient-Based Attribution Methods for Model Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09128/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Causal concept effect estimation is gaining increasing interest in the field of interpretable machine learning. This general approach explains the behaviors of machine learning models by estimating the causal effect of human-understandable concepts, which represent high-level knowledge more comprehensibly than raw inputs like tokens. However, existing causal concept effect explanation methods assume complete observation of all concepts involved within the dataset, which can fail in practice due to incomplete annotations or missing concept data. We theoretically demonstrate that unobserved concepts can bias the estimation of the causal effects of observed concepts. To address this limitation, we introduce the Missingness-aware Causal Concept Explainer (MCCE), a novel framework specifically designed to estimate causal concept effects when not all concepts are observable. Our framework learns to account for residual bias resulting from missing concepts and utilizes a linear predictor to model the relationships between these concepts and the outputs of black-box machine learning models. It can offer explanations on both local and global levels. We conduct validations using a real-world dataset, demonstrating that MCCE achieves promising performance compared to state-of-the-art explanation methods in causal concept effect estimation.