XAIRE: An ensemble-based methodology for determining the relative importance of variables in regression tasks. Application to a hospital emergency department

Nowadays it is increasingly important in many applications to understand how different factors influence a variable of interest in a predictive modeling process. This task becomes particularly important in the context of Explainable Artificial Intelligence. Knowing the relative impact of each variab...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Rivera, A.J., Cobo Muñoz, J., Pérez-Godoy , M.D., Sáenz de San Pedro, B., Charte, F., Elizondo, D., Rodríguez, C., Abolafia, M.L., Perea, A., Del Jesus, M.J.
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2023
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Jaén
Repositorio:RUJA. Repositorio Institucional de la Producción Científica de la Universidad de Jaén
OAI Identifier:oai:ruja.ujaen.es:10953/6973
Acceso en línea:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0933365723000088
https://hdl.handle.net/10953/6973
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Relative Importance of variables
Hospital emergency department
Time series forecasting
Regression analysis
Explainable artificial intelligence
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Descripción
Sumario:Nowadays it is increasingly important in many applications to understand how different factors influence a variable of interest in a predictive modeling process. This task becomes particularly important in the context of Explainable Artificial Intelligence. Knowing the relative impact of each variable on the output allows us to acquire more information about the problem and about the output provided by a model. This paper proposes a new methodology, XAIRE, that determines the relative importance of input variables in a prediction environment, considering multiple prediction models in order to increase generality and avoid bias inherent in a particular learning algorithm. Concretely, we present an ensemble-based methodology that promotes the aggregation of results from several prediction methods to obtain a relative importance ranking. Also, statistical tests are considered in the methodology in order to reveal significant differences between the relative importance of the predictor variables. As a case study, XAIRE is applied to the arrival of patients in a Hospital Emergency Department, which has resulted in one of the largest sets of different predictor variables in the literature. Results show the extracted knowledge related to the relative importance of the predictors involved in the case study.