explainpolysvm 1.0.0

Module for Global and Local explanations and feature selection for Support Vector Machines trained with polynomial kernels.

ExplainPolySVM

Welcome to ExplainPolySVM, a python package for feature importance analysis and feature selection for SVM models trained using the polynomial kernel

\(K_p(x,y|r,D,g)=(r+g(x^Ty))^D\),

on binary classification problems. Here \(x\) and \(y\) are column vectors and \(r\), \(g\), and \(D\) are the independent term, scale coefficient and the degree of the polynomial kernel, respectively. The greek letter gamma is often used for \(g\).

To express feature importance, the trained SVM model is transformed into a compressed linear version of the polynomial transformation used in the polynomial kernel.

Where to get

The source code is currently hosted on pip and on GitHub at: https://github.com/rikardvinge/explainpolysvm

Install with pip using

pip install explainpolysvm

To install from source, use the command

pip install ./explainpolysvm

To contribute to the development, it is recommended to install the module in edit mode including the “dev” extras to get the correct version of pytest.

pip install -e "./explainpolysvm[dev]"

Usage

The ExPSVM module

The main functionality is provided by the ExPSVM module. It interacts closely with Scikit-learn’s SVC support vector machine but can also be instantiated manually. Using a pretrained Scikit-learn SVC model svc_model as starting-point, a transformed SVM model using ExPSVM can be achieved by

import expsvm
sv = svc_model.support_vectors_
dual_coef = svc_model.dual_coef_
intercept = svc_model.intercept_
d = svc_model.degree
r = svc_model.coef0
gamma = svc_model.gamma_

es = expsvm.ExPSVM(sv=sv, dual_coef=dual_coef, intercept=intercept, kernel_d=d, kernel_r=r, kernel_gamma=gamma)
es.transform_svm()

Or, simply

import expsvm
es = expsvm.ExPSVM(svc_model=svc_model, transform=True)

Feature importance is retrieved by

feat_importance, feat_names, sort_order = es.feature_importance()

where feat_importance, feat_names, and sort_order are all Numpy ndarrays. feat_importance contains the importance of each feature. feat_names contains names of the features, details about which interaction the feature correspond to. sort_order provides the ordering of the interactions to reorder the interactions returned by es.get_interactions() to the same order as returned by es.feature_importance(). Feature names are returned as strings of the form i,j,k,l,..., where i, j, k, l are integers in the range \([1,p]\) where p is the number of features in the original space. For example, the interaction ‘0,1,0,2,2’ correspond to the interaction \(x_0^2*x_1*x_2^2\). Alternatively, setting the flag format_names=True returns the feature names as formatted strings that are suitable for plotting. For example, the interaction ‘0,1,0,2,2’ is returned as ‘$x_{0}^{2}$$x_{1}$$x_{2}^{2}$’, or as a list of feature names if the feature_names argument is passed to the ExPSVM constructor.

To return formatted feature names, use

feat_importance, formatted_feat_names, sort_order = es.feature_importance(format_names=True)

Or, to format an existing feature name list

formatted_feat_names = es.format_interaction_names(unformatted_feat_names)

Feature selection can be applied based on the contributions to the decision function. Three selection rules are currently implemented.

# Select the 10 most important features
feature_selection = es.feature_selection(n_interactions = 10)

# Select 60% of the features based on importance
feature_selection = es.feature_selection(frac_interactions = 0.6)

# Select features that sum to 99% of the sum of all feature importances
feature_selection = es.feature_selection(frac_importance = 0.99)

A word of caution

Under the hood, ExPSVM calculates a compressed version of the full polynomial transformation of the polynomial kernel. Without compression, the number of interactions in this transformation is of order \(O(p^d)\), where \(p\) is the number of features in the original space, and \(d\) the polynomial degree of the kernel. The compression reduces the number of interactions by keeping only one copy of each unique interaction, with a compression ratio of \(d!:1\). Even so, it is not recommended to use too large \(p\) or \(d\), both because of potential memory issues but also due to the decreasing explainability in models with very large kernel spaces.

Example usage

Global feature importance

This example is based on the h_stat_strong.ipynb. A five-dimensional binary classification dataset is created with the class separating function

\begin{equation*} f(x) = 0.5x_0x_1 - 0.5x_0x_2 - 0.15x_3^2 + 0.1\sum_{i_1}^5x_i + \epsilon f(x) > -1: class 1 f(x) < -1: class -1 \end{equation*}

where \(epsilon\) is a normally distributed random variable with zero mean and standard deviation 0.4; introduced to cause the two classes to overlap.

An SVM with a cubic kernel and parameters \(C=1, :math:`d=3\), \(gamma=scale\), \(r=sqrt(2)\) is on data sampled from the formula above, achieving an accuracy of 95.7% on a held-out test set.

The global explanations are given by ExplainPolySVM are shown below

The following code can be used to compute and visualize the interaction importance .. code-block:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sklearn.svm import SVC

from explainpolysvm import expsvm

# Fit SVM
C = 1
degree = 3
gamma = 'scale'
r = np.sqrt(2)

# Fit SVM

kernel = 'poly'
model = SVC(C=C, kernel=kernel, degree=degree, gamma=gamma, coef0=r)
model.fit(X_train, y_train)

sv = model.support_vectors_
dual_coef = np.squeeze(model.dual_coef_)
intercept = model.intercept_[0]
kernel_gamma = model._gamma

# Extract feature importance
es = expsvm.ExPSVM(sv=sv, dual_coef=dual_coef, intercept=intercept,
                kernel_d=degree, kernel_r=r, kernel_gamma=kernel_gamma)
es.transform_svm()

# Plot
es.plot_model_bar(n_features=15, magnitude=False, figsize=(8,3))

Local explanations

Following is an example of calculating local explanations and comparing them with SHAP. The example is based on interaction_importance_wbc.ipynb. In the example, a 2D SVM is trained on the Wisonsin Breast Cancer Dataset, achieving 97.3% accuracy.

By standardizing the features to zero mean and unit variance, we can calculate the global explanations after training, as shown below.

Even though a 2D model was trained, all but one of the 30 input features are the most important in the model, while the quadratic interactions are less impactful. This indicates that a linear model could suffice.

Since the trained quadratic kernel SVM is mainly linear, the impact of the individual input features can be compared with SHAP. This is shown below for an example from the negative class, with the decision function output -1.44, using the function es.plot_sample_waterfall()

The two local explanations for this sample are similar both in sign and magnitude. The reason for the different number of remaining features is that SHAP calculates the impact of the input features, including interactions with the feature, while ExplainPolySVM calculates the impact on the individual interactions.

A note on package maintenance

So far, ExplainPolySVM is developed by a single person. No promises will be made on maintenance nor expansions of this package. Please let me know if you are interested in continuing its development and feel free to fork or PR!

Future development

Below is a non-exhaustive list of useful and interesting features to add to the module.

• Add support for general polynomial kernels. In the current state, only the standard polynomial kernel is implemented; but any arbitrary polynomial kernel is expressible in the same way as the standard kernel. The only requirement this module have is that we can express any coefficients that are multiplied to the sum of the transformed support vectors and to keep track of the number of duplicates of the interactions.

• Add support for multi-class problems.

• Add support for the RBF Kernel by truncating the corresponding power series.

• Investigate if least-square SVM, support vector regression, one-class SVM, etc. can be expressed in similar terms as done in this project for the standard SVM.

Citations

If you use ExplainPolySVM in your work we would appreciate a citation. Please see the CITATION.cff, or use the following BibText

@InProceedings{vinge2025ExPSVM,
author="Vinge, Rikard
and Byttner, Stefan
and Lundstr{\"o}m, Jens",
editor="Krempl, Georg
and Puolam{\"a}ki, Kai
and Miliou, Ioanna",
title="Expanding Polynomial Kernels for Global and Local Explanations of Support Vector Machines",
booktitle="Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis XXIII",
year="2025",
publisher="Springer Nature Switzerland",
address="Cham",
pages="456--468",
abstract="Researchers and practitioners of machine learning nowadays rarely overlook the potential of using explainable AI methods to understand models and their predictions. These explainable AI methods mainly focus on the importance of individual input features. However, as important as the input features themselves, are the interactions between them. Methods such as the model-agnostic but computationally expensive Friedman's H-statistic and SHAP investigate and estimate the impact of interactions between the features. Due to computational constraints, the investigation is often limited to second-order interactions. In this paper, we present a novel, model-specific method to explain the impact of feature interactions in SVM classifiers with polynomial kernels. The method is computationally frugal and calculates the interaction importance exactly for any order of interaction. Explainability is achieved by mathematical transformation to a linear model with full fidelity to the original model. Further, we show how the model provides for both global and local explanations, and facilitates post-hoc feature selection. We demonstrate the method on two datasets; one is an artificial dataset where H-statistics requires extra care to provide useful interpretation; and one on the real-world scenario of the Wisconsin Breast Cancer dataset. Our experiments show that the method provides reasonable, easy to interpret and fast to compute explanations of the trained model.",
isbn="978-3-031-91398-3"
}