# How to Use Shap Kernal Explainer with Pipeline models?

I have a pandas DataFrame X. I would like to find the prediction explanation of a a particular model.

My model is given below:

pipeline = Pipeline(steps= [
('imputer', imputer_function()),
('classifier', RandomForestClassifier()
])
x_train, x_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.30, random_state=0)
y_pred = pipeline.fit(x_train, y_train).predict(x_test)


Now for prediction explainer, I use Kernal Explainer from Shap.

This is the following:

# use Kernel SHAP to explain test set predictions
shap.initjs()

shap_values = explainer.shap_values(x_test, nsamples=10)

# # plot the SHAP values for the Setosa output of the first instance


When I run the code, I get the error:

ValueError: Specifying the columns using strings is only supported for pandas DataFrames.

Provided model function fails when applied to the provided data set.

ValueError: Specifying the columns using strings is only supported for pandas DataFrames


Can anyone please help me? I'm really stuck with this. Both x_train and x_test are pandas data frames.

• Your given code doesn't match the code in the error traceback; in the traceback line 4, you're initializing the KernelExplainer with np.array(x_train). – Ben Reiniger May 23 '19 at 15:33
• Ohh sorry I've edited it. @Ben Reiniger – Nayana Madhu May 23 '19 at 16:19

The reason is kernel shap sends data as numpy array which has no column names. so we need to fix it as follows:

def model_predict(data_asarray):
data_asframe =  pd.DataFrame(data_asarray, columns=feature_names)
return estimator.predict(data_asframe)


Then,

shap_kernel_explainer = shap.KernelExplainer(model_predict, x_train, link='logit')
shap_values_single = shap_kernel_explainer.shap_values(x_test.iloc[0,:])