# ExDBSCAN: Explaining DBSCAN with Counterfactual Reasoning -- Additional Material

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30225 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30225/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2026.

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

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00399/) (2017)
- [Explaining Machine Learning Classifiers through Diverse Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07697/) (2019)
- [OpenML: networked science in machine learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.7722/) (2014)
- [Algorithmic Recourse: from Counterfactual Explanations to Interventions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06278/) (2020)
- [FACE: Feasible and Actionable Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09369/) (2019)
- [The Dangers of Post-hoc Interpretability: Unjustified Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09294/) (2019)
- [Explainable k-Means and k-Medians Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12538/) (2020)
- [Diverse, Global and Amortised Counterfactual Explanations for Uncertainty Estimates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02646/) (2021)
- [How to Find a Good Explanation for Clustering?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06580/) (2021)
- [MACE: An Efficient Model-Agnostic Framework for Counterfactual Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15540/) (2022)
- [Achieving Diversity in Counterfactual Explanations: a Review and Discussion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05840/) (2023)
- [AI-powered Fraud Detection in Decentralized Finance: A Project Life Cycle Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15992/) (2023)
- [Measuring diversity. A review and an empirical analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12365/) (2024)
- [Counterfactual Explanations for k-means and Gaussian Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10234/) (2025)
- [Feasible and Desirable Counterfactual Generation by Preserving Human Defined Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05993/) (2022)
- [DCFO: Density-Based Counterfactuals for Outliers -- Additional Material](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10659/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Clustering is an unsupervised technique for grouping data points by similarity. While explainability methods exist for supervised machine learning, they are not directly applicable to clustering, making it challenging to understand cluster assignments. This interpretability gap is particularly evident in the popular density-based method DBSCAN, which assigns points as inliers (cluster members in dense regions) or outliers (noise points in sparse regions). DBSCAN does not provide insight into why a particular point receives its assignment or whether its assignment is robust to small changes in the data. To address the lack of explainability, we introduce ExDBSCAN, a density-aware, post-hoc explanation method. ExDBSCAN offers actionable counterfactual explanations, with theoretical guarantees for validity. It generates multiple counterfactuals using a density connected weighted graph, adopting a physics-inspired model that repels counterfactual candidates from one another (diversity), while pulling them toward the instance to explain (proximity). Empirical evaluation on 30 tabular datasets comparing against four baselines shows that ExDBSCAN outperforms all baselines while attaining perfect validity and retrieving diverse, proximal counterfactuals.