Simple Explainable Machine Learning

Mehmet Akif Cifci
2 min readFeb 18, 2022

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers several opportunities to improve private and public life. Discovering patterns and structures in massive amounts of data in an automated manner is a fundamental component of data science, and it now drives applications in fields as diverse as computational medicine, law, and finance. However, such a hugely beneficial effect comes with a significant challenge: how do we understand the judgments provided by these algorithms so that we can trust them? We focused our efforts in this study on data-driven approaches, such as machine learning (ML) and pattern recognition models to examine and summarize the results and observations from the literature. The fact that ML models are rapidly being employed in many businesses helps to underline the report’s key argument. However, as the frequency and complexity of techniques increase, business stakeholders are becoming more concerned about model drawbacks data-specific biases.

A movement known as Explainable Machine Learning (XAI) has emerged to ensure that artificial intelligence systems are open and transparent about their goals and processes. It has been one of the trendiest phrases in the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence sector in the previous few years. In part, this is since many State-of-the-Art models are understandable black boxes despite their high accuracy and precision. For many businesses and enterprises, several percentage improvements in classification accuracy may not be as significant as answers to queries like “how does feature A impact the outcome?” This is why XAI is getting greater attention since it considerably assists decision-making and causal inference. Explainability in machine learning can describe what occurs in your model from input to output. Models become more transparent, and the “black box” issue is no longer an issue.

What exactly is explainable AI? Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is a collection of procedures and strategies that enable human users to grasp and trust the findings and output produced by machine learning algorithms. The term “explainable AI” refers to the ability to define an AI model, its projected effect, and any biases.

Explainable AI is about understanding ML models better. How they make decisions, and why. The three most important aspects of model explainability are:

Transparency

Ability to question

Ease of understanding

Methodologies for Explainability

There are two approaches to explainability:

Globally — This is the model’s overarching explanation. It gives us a large picture perspective of the model and how data elements impact the outcome collectively.

Locally — This teaches us about each instance and feature in the data separately (similar to explaining observations observed at different models) and how characteristics impact the outcome individually.

References

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Mehmet Akif Cifci

Mehmet Akif Cifci holds the position of associate professor in the field of computer science at TU Wien, located in Austria.