LandscapeSHAP: Which Persistent Homology Class Gets the Credit?

Nikola Milićević

Shapley values, a solution concept from cooperative game theory, have recently become a standard tool for feature credit allocation in machine learning. They provide an axiomatically justified method to fairly distribute a model's prediction among the data features. Shapley values have not yet been applied to explain machine learning models trained on features from topological data analysis. We develop what we believe is the first such approach, focusing on the persistence landscape featurization of persistence diagrams. Because each landscape coordinate is a rank statistic, crediting a model's prediction back to individual persistent homology classes (persistence diagram points) is nontrivial. We introduce LandscapeSHAP, a method for fair credit allocation to persistence diagram points based on a model's prediction. For linear models on persistence landscapes, LandscapeSHAP has a closed form expression that gives the exact Shapley value of every persistence diagram point. In particular, there is no coalition sampling required. We further prove that the four Shapley "fairness" axioms uniquely characterize this credit allocation for any model, not only linear ones. For a general…