EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

658. Computing Counterfactual Explanations for Linear Optimization: A New Class of Bilevel Models and a Tailored Penalty Alternating Direction Method

Invited abstract in session WB-48: New Approaches in Explainable Optimization, stream Transparent and Fair Decision Making with Mathematical Optimization.

Wednesday, 10:30-12:00
Room: Parkinson B09

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Henri Lefebvre
Department of Mathematics, Universität Trier
2. Martin Schmidt
Department of Mathematics, Trier University

Abstract

Explainable artificial intelligence is one of the most important trends in modern machine-learning research. The idea is to explain the outcome of a model by presenting a certain change in the input of the model so that the outcome changes significantly. In this talk, we study this question for linear optimization problems as an automated decision-making tool. This leads to a new class of linear bilevel optimization problems that have more nonlinearities in their single-level reformulations compared to traditionally studied linear bilevel problems. For this class of problems, we present a tailored penalty alternating direction method and present its convergence theory that mainly ensures that we compute stationary points of the single-level reformulation. Finally, we illustrate the applicability of this method using the example of a real-world energy system model as well as by computing counterfactual explanations for a large set of linear optimization problems from the NETLIB as it has been proposed in the recent literature.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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