HKU IDS Scholar Seminar Series #22:
Disentangled Feature Importance
Speaker
Prof Jinhong DU, Assistant Professor, HKU IDS & Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, School of Computing and Data Science
Date
Dec 10, 2025 (Wed)
Time
11:00am – 12:00nn
Venue
IDS Seminar Room, P603, Graduate House | Zoom
Mode
Hybrid. Seats for on-site participants are limited. A confirmation email will be sent to participants who have successfully registered.
Abstract
Quantifying feature importance with valid statistical uncertainty is central to interpretable machine learning, yet classical model-agnostic methods often fail under feature correlation, producing unreliable attributions and compromising statistical inference. Existing approaches—such as Shapley values and leave-one-covariate-out—are vulnerable to correlation distortion, limiting their robustness across diverse tasks. We introduce Disentangled Feature Importance (DFI), a model-agnostic framework that resolves these limitations by combining principled statistical inference with computational flexibility. DFI leverages optimal transport to learn flexible disentanglement maps and provide an interpretable pathway for understanding how importance is attributed through the data’s correlation structure. The framework generalizes to flow matching and differentiable loss functions, enabling statistically valid importance assessment for black-box predictors in both regression and classification. We establish statistical inference theory, which enables valid confidence intervals and hypothesis testing with Type I error control. Empirical results on synthetic and biomedical datasets show that DFI delivers substantially higher statistical power than removal-based and conditional permutation methods, while maintaining robust, interpretable attributions under severe feature interdependence.
Speaker

Prof Jinhong DU
Assistant Professor @ HKU IDS & CDS
Prof. Jinhong Du is an HKU-100 Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong, beginning in Fall 2025. He holds joint appointments in the HKU Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science, and the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, School of Computing and Data Science.
His research bridges statistical theory and high-impact applications, focusing on causal inference, interpretable machine learning, high-dimensional statistics, and statistical genomics. Dr. Du’s work has been published in leading venues across multiple disciplines, including premier statistics journals like the Journal of the American Statistical Association and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, top machine learning conferences like NeurIPS and ICML, and prominent scientific journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
He earned his Ph.D. in Statistics and Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University, an M.S. in Statistics from the University of Chicago, and a B.S. in Statistics from Sun Yat-sen University.
For full biography of Prof. DU, please refer to: https://datascience.hku.hk/people/jinhong-du/
Moderator

Prof Yi MA
Director @ HKU IDS & CDS Professor Yi Ma is Chair Professor and Director of the Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science at the University of Hong Kong since January 2023 and also a Professor at UC Berkeley. He earned dual bachelor’s degrees from Tsinghua University in 1995, master’s degrees in EECS and Mathematics in 1997, and a PhD in EECS from Berkeley in 2000. His career includes faculty roles at UIUC (2000–2011), leadership at Microsoft Research Asia (2009–2014), and executive dean at ShanghaiTech University (2014–2017), before joining Berkeley’s faculty in 2018. He has published extensively in computer vision and data analysis, won notable awards including the NSF Career Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, David Marr prize, and best paper awards, and has chaired major conferences. He is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and SIAM. For full biography of Prof. MA, please refer to: https://datascience.hku.hk/people/yi-ma/
Moderator
Professor Yi Ma is a Chair Professor in the Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science (HKU IDS) and Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong. He took up the Directorship of HKU IDS on January 12, 2023. He is also a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published about 60 journal papers, 120 conference papers, and three textbooks in computer vision, generalized principal component analysis, and high-dimensional data analysis.
Professor Ma’s research interests cover computer vision, high-dimensional data analysis, and intelligent systems. For full biography of Professor Ma, please refer to: https://datascience.hku.hk/people/yi-ma/
For information, please contact:
Email: datascience@hku.hk
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