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arXiv:1602.04938cs.LG

"Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier

Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Sameer Singh, Carlos Guestrin

Abstract

Despite widespread adoption, machine learning models remain mostly black boxes. Understanding the reasons behind predictions is, however, quite important in assessing trust, which is fundamental if one plans to take action based on a prediction, or when choosing whether to deploy a new model. Such understanding also provides insights into the model, which can be used to transform an untrustworthy model or prediction into a trustworthy one. In this work, we propose LIME, a novel explanation technique that explains the predictions of any classifier in an interpretable and faithful manner, by learning an interpretable model locally around the prediction. We also propose a method to explain models by presenting representative individual predictions and their explanations in a non-redundant way, framing the task as a submodular optimization problem. We demonstrate the flexibility of these methods by explaining different models for text (e.g. random forests) and image classification (e.g. neural networks). We show the utility of explanations via novel experiments, both simulated and with human subjects, on various scenarios that require trust: deciding if one should trust a prediction, choosing between models, improving an untrustworthy classifier, and identifying why a classifier should not be trusted.

arXiv comments
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.LGMachine Learning cs.AIArtificial Intelligence stat.MLMachine Learning (Statistics)

On Hacker News

Linked by 12 identifiable commenters in 13 comments across 12 threads, from Apr 2016 to Jun 2024. Found in 4 HN submissions from Apr 2016 to Jul 2021. Open submission discussions.

Comments linking this paper, per year.

Discussed in comments12 threads

    • That's what model interpretability research is. You can train an interpretable model from the uninterpretable teacher, you can look at layer activations and how they correspond to certain features, or apply a hundred other domain-specific methods depending on your architecture.…

      pona-aView on HNParent context

    • One reason to want to understand what some "black box" is doing is distribution/dataset shift, especially in medical applications. For example, suppose you're building a neural net to detect early-stage lung cancer on medical imaging, and you test/train it on patients in a small…

      spekcularView on HNParent context

    • Great Points. Really appreciated. Will have to put extra effort to learn about the feature engineering part of the problem. Also, if you know a few things about the data it becomes a little easier to explain what your model is doing and why it is producing those results. Found a…

      rangerranvirView on HNParent context

  1. Interpretable Machine Learning 1 comment
    • This is plain wrong. https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04938 A simple counter-example. A really neat library called "eli5" and specifically, it's white-boxing functionality for NLP and CV applications does a great job of helping one figure out if their model is learning "incorrect"…

      Der_EinzigeView on HNParent context

    • There's a whole field studying machine learning interpretability. This recent Distill article is a good introduction [1]. The lime [2] package, based on this paper [3], is also notable. [1]: https://distill.pub/2018/building-blocks/ [2]: https://github.com/marcotcr/lime [3]…

      jamessbView on HNParent context

    • Explain in detail all of the minute muscle movements that you make to throw a ball. Not all things that humans learn are easily articulated or explained, not because those humans aren't articulate, but because they learned actions that are more easily intuited. Also, on this…

      standyroView on HNParent context

    • LIME: Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations; https://www.oreilly.com/learning/introduction-to-local-inter... "“Why Should I Trust You?” Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier": https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.04938.pdf…

      nlView on HNParent context

    • Agreed and I am not arguing to regulate the obvious but now as AI can potentially touch and transform every walk of life, guidelines are needed to keep big players from going too far. There won't be any ground for plausible deniability if principals are set. For example I think…

      drieddustView on HNParent context

    • While I wouldn't say that the problem has been "well studied", the research community has been paying interest, and some progress has been made, most notably- as pointed out by benjaminjackman- LIME[1]. Roughly speaking, LIME learns a locally approximate model which can be…

      halwaView on HNParent context

    • That's not what "explainable ML is". That project is about explaining how (say) a given classifier came to a decision on a given set of data. This is fairly easy on a tree-based classifier, but on a deep neural network is extremely difficult. The most impressive piece of work…

      nlView on HNParent context

    • That's what I was thinking of, too. If any one wants the direct link to the arXiv paper, it's here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04938 . One of the authors is Carlos Guestrin, one of the co-founders of Dato/Turi/Graphlabs that was recently acquired by Apple, fwiw.

      vonnikView on HNParent context

    • Right. This paper ([0]) is actually mentioned in the DARPA BAA ([1]) as an example of a possible direction. A somewhat-similar scheme is [2]. Both seem to do some kind of sensitivity analysis, so as to show the user which parts of the input were most important for coming up with…

      yoav_hollanderView on HNParent context

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