Explaining Black-Box Algorithms Using Probabilistic Contrastive Counterfactuals

Summary: Introduces LEWIS, a causality-based XAI framework using probabilistic counterfactuals to explain black-box decisions from input-output data. Provides provably effective local/global explanations and recourse, outperforming LIME/SHAP on real data. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 6260
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 7.8953538e-05
Overall Rank: 2,923 | 79.67%
DOI: 10.1145/3448016.3458455

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,872	Explainable AI: Foundations, Applications, Opportunities for Data Management Research	2022	SIGMOD	5.8609352e-05
5,313	XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality	2023	SIGMOD	5.573009e-05
5,607	HYPER: Hypothetical Reasoning With What-If and How-To Queries Using a Probabilistic Causal Approach	2022	SIGMOD	5.4137872e-05
5,997	FACET: Robust Counterfactual Explanation Analytics	2023	SIGMOD	5.2415551e-05
7,000	Generating Interpretable Data-Based Explanations for Fairness Debugging using Gopher	2022	SIGMOD	4.8676312e-05
7,449	OTClean: Data Cleaning for Conditional Independence Violations using Optimal Transport	2024	SIGMOD	4.7269357e-05
10,101	Privacy-preserving and Verifiable Causal Prescriptive Analytics	2026	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,147	Causal Explanations for Disparate Trends: Where and Why?	2026	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,213	Stress-Testing Causal Claims via Cardinality Repairs	2026	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,428	CausalExplain: Causal Explanations of Black-box Models with Training Data Subsets	2025	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,524	Understanding the Black Box: A Deep Empirical Dive into Shapley Value Approximations for Tabular Data	2025	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,581	Causal DAG Summarization	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
10,740	Finding Convincing Views to Endorse a Claim	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
10,954	Counterfactual Explanation at Will, with Zero Privacy Leakage	2024	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
11,314	Augmenting Decision Making via Interactive What-If Analysis	2022	CIDR	4.1945683e-05
11,346	CFDB: Machine Learning Model Analysis via Databases of CounterFactuals	2022	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
13,260	Demonstration of Generating Explanations for Black-Box Algorithms Using Lewis	2021	VLDB	-

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,041	Interventional Fairness : Causal Database Repair for Algorithmic Fairness	2019	SIGMOD	0.00014482047
1,449	Causal Relational Learning	2020	SIGMOD	0.0001193267
2,810	Bias in OLAP Queries: Detection, Explanation, and Removal (Or Think Twice About Your AVG-Query)	2018	SIGMOD	8.0810163e-05
7,262	HypDB: A Demonstration of Detecting, Explaining and Resolving Bias in OLAP queries	2018	VLDB	4.78584e-05

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