In recent years, neural networks have demonstrated their remarkable ability to discern intricate patterns and relationships from raw data. However, understanding the inner workings of these black box models remains challenging, yet crucial for high-stake decisions. Among the prominent approaches for explaining these black boxes are feature attribution methods, which assign relevance or contribution scores to each input variable for a model prediction. Despite the plethora of proposed techniques, ranging from gradient-based to backpropagation-based methods, a significant debate persists about which method to use. Various evaluation metrics have been proposed to assess the trustworthiness or robustness of their results. However, current research highlights disagreement among state-of-the-art methods in their explanations. Our work addresses this confusion by investigating the explanations' fundamental and distributional behavior. Additionally, through a comprehensive simulation study, we illustrate the impact of common scaling and encoding techniques on the explanation quality, assess their efficacy across different effect sizes, and demonstrate the origin of inconsistency in rank-based evaluation metrics.

近年来，神经网络展示出了从原始数据中识别复杂模式和关系的卓越能力。然而，理解这些黑盒模型的内部机制仍具挑战性，但对于高风险决策至关重要。我们的研究通过调查解释的基本和分布行为来解决这种困惑。此外，通过全面的模拟研究，我们展示了常见缩放和编码技术对解释质量的影响，评估它们在不同效应大小中的功效，并展示了基于排序的评估指标的不一致性的来源。

神经网络特征评估中的不一致问题探究