A Causal Framework for Evaluating Deferring Systems

Abstract: Deferring systems extend supervised Machine Learning (ML) models with the possibility to defer predictions to human experts. However, evaluating the impact of a deferring strategy on system accuracy is still an overlooked area. This paper fills this gap by evaluating deferring systems through a causal lens. We link the potential outcomes framework for causal inference with deferring systems, which allows to identify the causal impact of the deferring strategy on predictive accuracy. We distinguish two scenarios. In the first one, we have access to both the human and ML model predictions for the deferred instances. Here, we can identify the individual causal effects for deferred instances and the aggregates of them. In the second one, only human predictions are available for the deferred instances. Here, we can resort to regression discontinuity designs to estimate a local causal effect. We evaluate our approach on synthetic and real datasets for seven deferring systems from the literature.