SHAP — Fair Credit for Every Feature
SHAP is the most important interpretability method in practice today, because it answers "how much did each feature contribute to this prediction?" with a principled, mathematically fair answer borrowed from game theory. Where LIME gives an intuitive but unstable local explanation, SHAP gives a grounded one with guarantees — and it unifies local and global interpretability into one framework. This post explains the idea behind SHAP without the heavy math, and why it became the field's default.
SHAP is the field's default: it answers 'how much did each feature contribute?' with a fair, game-theoretic answer (Shapley values), fixing LIME's instability with real guarantees and unifying local and global interpretability. The catch: exponential cost (TreeSHAP fixes it for trees), and it's attribution, not causation.