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I have a simple neural network for binary classification.

The input features include age, sex, economic situation, illness, disability, etc. The output is simply 1 and 0.

I would like to order the features from the greatest to least impact it had on the classification.

An example answer could look like this:

Classification: 1

  1. illness
  2. economic situation
  3. disability
  4. sex
  5. age

Another example:

Classification: 0

  1. economic situation
  2. age
  3. disability
  4. sex
  5. illness
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Two popular methods I’ve seen done:

1) For each feature, remove it and run the model and see the impact it has on the result. The idea is that the larger the impact, the more pertinent it was to the result.

2) Look at the gradients magnitude $|\nabla_f {y} |$. You can either look at the raw gradient or look at the guided back-propagation which is just the back props product rule, but you only look at when the nodes positively help trigger a neuron by taking only the positive gradients at each step.

There’s probably also more methods. Hope this helped.

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  • $\begingroup$ We don't get all of the (nonlinear) interactions in vanilla linear regression, but #1 is how we do parameter inference in statistics! (At least it's a way.) $\endgroup$
    – Dave
    Jul 29, 2020 at 17:29

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