P$$^{2}$$CE: Model-Agnostic Plausible Pareto-Optimal Counterfactual Explanations

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The increasing use of machine learning algorithms in social applications has raised concerns about fairness and transparency, leading to the development of counterfactual explanations. These explanations support individuals to understand and potentially alter unfavorable decisions in areas such as loan applications, job selections, and more, by providing actionable changes to input features that would lead to a desired outcome. Existing methods often struggle to balance feasibility, plausibility, and computational efficiency. To address this, we introduce P $$^{2}$$ CE, an algorithm for generating plausible Pareto-optimal counterfactual explanations, offering users a diverse set of optimal trade-offs between different notions of feasibility. P $$^{2}$$ CE employs an auxiliary isolation forest outlier detector to ensure that explanations are in accordance with the data distribution and leverages SHAP values to obtain optimal results with short computing times, regardless of the underlying model. Our algorithm was empirically evaluated on three datasets, demonstrating superior performance in terms of both solution quality and computational efficiency compared to related techniques.