# Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR

- **Authors**: Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, Chris Russell
- **Year**: 2017
- **Summary**: This paper proposes counterfactual explanations as a way to explain automated decisions. A counterfactual explanation describes the smallest change to the world (input features) that would produce a different outcome. For example, "You would have gotten the loan if your income was $10,000 higher." This is intuitive for humans and provides actionable recourse.
- **Link**: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00399