Evaluation of Counterfactual Explanation Robustness for Computer Vision Agriculture Yield-Forecast Models Under Satellite Cloud-Mask Gaps: An Interpretability Reliability Bound for Cooperative Storage Decisions

Counterfactual explanations are increasingly proposed as the interface through which cooperative storage managers interrogate computer-vision yield-forecast models, yet their reliability under the satellite cloud-mask gaps that routinely afflict agricultural remote sensing has not been bounded. The bound is derived from a Lipschitz continuity assumption on the forecast model and a masking-operator perturbation analysis, and it is expressed as a function of the cloud-mask gap fraction, the model's local Lipschitz constant, and the counterfactual search tolerance. A replication-based evaluation of the before-after-control-impact estimator was conducted to characterise the operating characteristics of the design under a declared variance structure (between-cluster SD = 6.0, residual SD = 4.5, intraclass correlation = 0.64), with power estimated across 2000 design cells. The reliability bound degrades non-linearly as the gap fraction rises, and that the intraclass correlation of 0.64 implies that cooperative-level aggregation of counterfactual recourse is necessary to preserve explanation stability. The contribution is a decision-relevant reliability bound that storage cooperatives can use to set a maximum tolerable cloud-mask gap before counterfactual recourse is suspended.