🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the high computational complexity and poor scalability of SHAP in high-dimensional settings by proposing XAI–TU, a novel cooperative game-theoretic framework that integrates equal surplus and proportional allocation principles. Within this framework, the authors design ESENSC_rev2, a low-complexity feature attribution rule that satisfies the null player property and other key interpretability axioms. ESENSC_rev2 is the first SHAP alternative to offer both a polynomial-time closed-form solution and a rigorous axiomatic foundation. Experimental results across multiple tabular datasets demonstrate that ESENSC_rev2 efficiently approximates exact SHAP values with high accuracy, achieving a favorable balance between computational efficiency and theoretical guarantees while significantly improving scalability in high-dimensional scenarios.
📝 Abstract
In this paper, we provide a theoretically grounded and computationally efficient alternative to SHAP. To this end, we study feature attribution through the lens of cooperative game theory by formulating a class of XAI--TU games. Building on this formulation, we investigate equal-surplus-type and proportional-allocation-type attribution rules and propose a low-cost attribution rule, ESENSC_rev2, constructed by combining two polynomial-time closed-form rules while ensuring the null-player property in the XAI--TU domain.
Extensive experiments on tabular prediction tasks demonstrate that ESENSC_rev2 closely approximates exact SHAP while substantially improving scalability as the number of features increases. These empirical results indicate that equal-surplus-type attribution rules can achieve favorable trade-offs between computational cost and approximation accuracy in high-dimensional explainability settings.
To provide theoretical foundations for these findings, we establish an axiomatic characterization showing that ESENSC_rev2 is uniquely determined by efficiency, the null-player axiom, a restricted differential marginality principle, an intermediate inessential-game property, and axioms that reduce computational requirements. Our results suggest that axiomatically justified and computationally efficient attribution rules can serve as practical and theoretically principled substitutes for SHAP-based approximations in modern explainability pipelines.