First-Mover Bias in Gradient Boosting Explanations: Mechanism, Detection, and Resolution

Code

• github.com/drakecaraker/dash-shap
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Abstract

We isolate and empirically characterize first-mover bias -- a path-dependent concentration of feature importance caused by sequential residual fitting in gradient boosting -- as a specific mechanistic cause of the well-known instability of SHAP-based feature rankings under multicollinearity. When correlated features compete for early splits, gradient boosting creates a self-reinforcing advantage for whichever feature is selected first: subsequent trees inherit modified residuals that favor the incumbent, concentrating SHAP importance on an arbitrary feature rather than distributing it across the correlated group. Scaling up a single model amplifies this effect -- a Large Single Model with the same total tree count as our method produces the worst explanations of any approach tested. We demonstrate that model independence is sufficient to resolve first-mover bias in the linear regime, and remains the most effective mitigation under nonlinear data-generating processes. Both our proposed method, DASH (Diversified Aggregation of SHAP), and simple seed-averaging (Stochastic Retrain) restore stability by breaking the sequential dependency chain, confirming that the operative mechanism is independence between explained models. At rho=0.9, both achieve stability=0.977, while the single-best workflow degrades to 0.958 and the Large Single Model to 0.938. On the Breast Cancer dataset, DASH improves stability from 0.32 to 0.93 (+0.61) against a tree-count-matched baseline. DASH additionally provides two diagnostic tools -- the Feature Stability Index (FSI) and Importance-Stability (IS) Plot -- that detect first-mover bias without ground truth, enabling practitioners to audit explanation reliability before acting on feature rankings. Software and reproducible benchmarks are available at https://github.com/DrakeCaraker/dash-shap.

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