AI Governance Engineer
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Counterfactual explanation

By Updated

An explanation that states the smallest change to the input that would have changed the outcome, restricted to features the person can actually change 1. It is the natural basis for recourse.

Developed in
ch. 16, Counterfactual explanations
Chapters
ch. 16, Fairness & XAI
Contrast with
Counterfactual fairness
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

One chapter of the Body of Knowledge uses the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

  • Recourse

    The ability of a person to obtain a different decision by changing inputs they can actually act on, such as income rather than age.

Sources

  1. [1] "Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR" (Wachter, Mittelstadt and Russell; Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, 2018; arXiv 1711.00399). arXiv. 2017-11-01. https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00399 (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Counterfactual explanation. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/counterfactual-explanation. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026counterfactualexplanation,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Counterfactual explanation}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/counterfactual-explanation}
}