Self-Explaining Segment Trees: A KPI-Conditioned Segmentation Framework for Business Analytics with Node-Level Explanation via Recursive Subspace Partitioning

Abstract

Business users confronted with a moving metric need to know which part of their data moved and why. Existing data-explanation methods typically return predicates: conjunctions of attribute-value conditions that isolate responsible records. Predicates are exact and directly executable as filters, but they describe axis-aligned regions and may not compactly capture segments defined by combinations of continuous tendencies. This paper presents Self-Explaining Segment Trees (SEST), an architecture in which an explanation is a multivariate cluster in a feature subspace selected for relevance to a designated key performance indicator (KPI). SEST selects the subspace once per KPI using Shapley attributions over a decision-tree surrogate, recursively partitions the population while choosing the branching factor independently at each node through mixture-model silhouette search, and attaches to every node a dual explanation payload: standardized effect sizes over numeric features and type-dependent contribution profiles over user-designated dimensions. These explanations are computed from untransformed data so surfaced values retain source units and category labels. A stance layer reduces any depth of the tree to its extremal KPI-suppressing and KPI-amplifying segments. We establish termination and a node-count bound determined by the depth limit and minimum segment size, and characterize per-tree construction cost as quadratic in population size in the degenerate case and geometrically decaying across depth in the balanced case. This is an architecture and methodology paper; we report no predictive-accuracy or validation results and leave outcome validation to future work.