RashomonGB: Analyzing the Rashomon Effect and Mitigating Predictive Multiplicity in Gradient Boosting

The Rashomon effect is a mixed blessing in responsible machine learning. It enhances the prospects of finding models that perform well in accuracy while adhering to ethical standards, such as fairness or interpretability. Conversely, it poses a risk to the credibility of machine decisions through predictive multiplicity. While recent studies have explored the Rashomon effect across various machine learning algorithms, its impact on gradient boosting---an algorithm widely applied to tabular datasets---remains unclear. This paper addresses this gap by systematically analyzing the Rashomon effect and predictive multiplicity in gradient boosting algorithms. We provide rigorous theoretical derivations to examine the Rashomon effect in the context of gradient boosting and offer an information-theoretic characterization of the Rashomon set. Additionally, we introduce a novel inference technique called RashomonGB to efficiently inspect the Rashomon effect in practice. On more than 20 datasets, our empirical results show that RashomonGB outperforms existing baselines in terms of improving the estimation of predictive multiplicity metrics and model selection with group fairness constraints. Lastly, we propose a framework to mitigate predictive multiplicity in gradient boosting and empirically demonstrate its effectiveness.