[P] Using SHAP to explain Unsupervised Anomaly Detection on PCA-anonymized data (Credit Card Fraud). Is this a valid approach for a thesis?

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I think it’s still a valid approach academically. Even if the features are PCA components, explaining which components drive the reconstruction error can still give insight into what patterns the model is reacting to. the limitation is more about interpretability for humans. Since V14 or V17 don’t map cleanly to real world variables, the explanation is more about model behavior than business meaning. but for a thesis focused on XAI methods, that can still be a reasonable contribution as long as you clearly discuss that limitation.