Algorithmic recourse tells an individual which feasible actions would change an unfavourable prediction. Feature attribution explains a prediction, but the most important causes are often not the best levers. We propose Actionable Case-Based Feature Importance (A-CBFI), which turns the descriptive decomposition of Localized-CBFI into a prescriptive, interventional diagnosis on a structural causal model. A-CBFI prescribes the cheapest single action when one exists and searches joint actions only when no single action is enough. We show that interventional interaction also arises from path blocking and shared descendants, which model-only interaction indices cannot see, and that averaged interaction scores cancel where additive targeting fails. On ten tabular benchmarks (6,657 recourse queries), A-CBFI was never significantly less successful than an untargeted causal beam search, prescribed fewer direct actions (1.10 vs 1.38) with fewer model evaluations (119 vs 150), and offered substitutable single actions for 68.2% of the queries a single action solves. Success gains appeared mainly where causes are immutable and single actions are insufficient.
Background: Understanding individual predictions in complex tabular models remains challenging, as existing additive frameworks like SHAP and LIME often obscure structural logic by absorbing nonlinear interactions into individual feature scores. Exposing these latent interaction structures is essential for automated auditing in high-stakes environments where understanding the logic of model behavior is as essential as predictive accuracy. Methods: To address this limitation, we introduce the localized case-based feature importance (CBFI) framework. Unlike traditional numerical attribution, our method decomposes instance-specific predictions into structurally distinct components, effectively separating independent main effects (G1) from pure interactions (G4) to capture explicit feature synergies and provide a principled approach for diagnosing feature combinations. Results: Comprehensive experiments on wine quality classification and medical insurance regression demonstrate that localized CBFI successfully disentangles complex interactions hidden by additive models. Furthermore, fidelity tests and synthetic ground-truth benchmarks confirm that the identified interactions correspond precisely to the nonlinear structural dependency patterns embedded in complex architectures, including gradient boosting and deep neural networks, thereby successfully shifting the explainable AI paradigm from simple numerical attribution to the recovery of interaction-driven contributions.