XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality
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In light of the growing popularity of Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), understanding the underlying causes of the knowledge acquired by EDA is crucial, but remains under-researched. This study promotes for the first time a transparent and explicable perspective on data analysis, called eXplainable Data Analysis (XDA). XDA provides data analysis with qualitative and quantitative explanations of causal and non-causal semantics. This way, XDA will significantly improve human understanding and confidence in the outcomes of data analysis, facilitating accurate data interpretation and decision-making in the real world. For this purpose, we present XInsight, a general framework for XDA. XInsight is a three-module, end-to-end pipeline designed to extract causal graphs, translate causal primitives into XDA semantics, and quantify the quantitative contribution of each explanation to a data fact. XInsight uses a set of design concepts and optimizations to address the inherent difficulties associated with integrating causality into XDA. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets as well as human evaluations demonstrate the highly promising capabilities of XInsight.
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