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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 Guodong LI

Associate Head (Research) & Professor @ HKU IDS & CDS

Professor Guodong Li joined the Department of Statistics & Actuarial Science, The University of Hong Kong, in 2009 as an Assistant Professor, and currently is a Professor. Prior to this, Professor Li had worked at the Division of Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, as an Assistant Professor since he received his PhD degree in statistics from the University of Hong Kong in 2007. He got his Bachelor and Master degrees in Statistics from Peking University.

For full biography of Prof. LI, please refer to: https://datascience.hku.hk/people/professor-guodong-li/

Moderator

Prof. Yi Ma
Director; Professor, Chair of Artificial Intelligence @ HKU IDS & Department of Computer Science 

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