  In the environment of fair lending laws and the General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR), the ability to explain a model's prediction is of paramount
importance. High quality explanations are the first step in assessing fairness.
Counterfactuals are valuable tools for explainability. They provide actionable,
comprehensible explanations for the individual who is subject to decisions made
from the prediction. It is important to find a baseline for producing them. We
propose a simple method for generating counterfactuals by using gradient
descent to search in the latent space of an autoencoder and benchmark our
method against approaches that search for counterfactuals in feature space.
Additionally, we implement metrics to concretely evaluate the quality of the
counterfactuals. We show that latent space counterfactual generation strikes a
balance between the speed of basic feature gradient descent methods and the
sparseness and authenticity of counterfactuals generated by more complex
feature space oriented techniques.
