Nowadays, the interpretation of why a machine learning (ML) model makes certain inferences is as crucial as the accuracy of such inferences. Some ML models like the decision tree possess inherent interpretability that can be directly comprehended by humans. Others like artificial neural networks (ANN), however, rely on external methods to uncover the deduction mechanism. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) is one of such external methods, which requires a background dataset when interpreting ANNs. Generally, a background dataset consists of instances randomly sampled from the training dataset. However, the sampling size and its effect on SHAP remain to be unexplored. In our empirical study on the MIMIC-III dataset, we show that the two core explanations - SHAP values and variable rankings fluctuate when using different background datasets acquired from random sampling, indicating that users cannot unquestioningly trust the one-shot interpretation from SHAP. Luckily, such fluctuation decreases with the increase of the background dataset size. Also, we notice an U-shape in the stability assessment of SHAP variable rankings, demonstrating that SHAP is more reliable in ranking the most and least important variables compared to moderately important ones. Overall, our results suggest that users should take into account how background data affects SHAP results, with improved SHAP stability as the background sample size increases.
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A significant drawback of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) approaches is the assumption of feature independence. This paper focuses on integrating causal knowledge in XAI methods to increase trust and help users assess explanations' quality. We propose a novel extension to a widely used local and model-agnostic explainer that explicitly encodes causal relationships in the data generated around the input instance to explain. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves superior performance comparing the initial one for both the fidelity in mimicking the black-box and the stability of the explanations.
Despite the increasing relevance of explainable AI, assessing the quality of explanations remains a challenging issue. Due to the high costs associated with human-subject experiments, various proxy metrics are often used to approximately quantify explanation quality. Generally, one possible interpretation of the quality of an explanation is its inherent value for teaching a related concept to a student. In this work, we extend artificial simulatability studies to the domain of graph neural networks. Instead of costly human trials, we use explanation-supervisable graph neural networks to perform simulatability studies to quantify the inherent usefulness of attributional graph explanations. We perform an extensive ablation study to investigate the conditions under which the proposed analyses are most meaningful. We additionally validate our methods applicability on real-world graph classification and regression datasets. We find that relevant explanations can significantly boost the sample efficiency of graph neural networks and analyze the robustness towards noise and bias in the explanations. We believe that the notion of usefulness obtained from our proposed simulatability analysis provides a dimension of explanation quality that is largely orthogonal to the common practice of faithfulness and has great potential to expand the toolbox of explanation quality assessments, specifically for graph explanations.
Algorithmic fairness is of utmost societal importance, yet the current trend in large-scale machine learning models requires training with massive datasets that are typically biased. In this context, pre-processing methods that focus on modeling and correcting bias in the data emerge as valuable approaches. In this paper, we propose FairShap, a novel pre-processing (re-weighting) method for fair algorithmic decision-making through data valuation by means of Shapley Values. Our approach is model agnostic and easily interpretable, as it measures the contribution of each training data point to a predefined fairness metric. We empirically validate FairShap on several state-of-the-art datasets of different nature, with a variety of training scenarios and models and show how it outperforms other methods, yielding fairer models with higher or similar levels of accuracy. We also illustrate FairShap's interpretability by means of histograms and latent space visualizations. We believe that this work represents a promising direction in interpretable and model-agnostic approaches to algorithmic fairness that yield competitive accuracy even when only biased datasets are available.
We show that most structured prediction problems can be solved in linear time and space by considering them as partial orderings of the tokens in the input string. Our method computes real numbers for each token in an input string and sorts the tokens accordingly, resulting in as few as 2 total orders of the tokens in the string. Each total order possesses a set of edges oriented from smaller to greater tokens. The intersection of total orders results in a partial order over the set of input tokens, which is then decoded into a directed graph representing the desired structure. Experiments show that our method achieves 95.4 LAS and 96.9 UAS by using an intersection of 2 total orders, 95.7 LAS and 97.1 UAS with 4 on the English Penn Treebank dependency parsing benchmark. Our method is also the first linear-complexity coreference resolution model and achieves 79.2 F1 on the English OntoNotes benchmark, which is comparable with state of the art.
The field of text generation suffers from a severe shortage of labeled data due to the extremely expensive and time consuming process involved in manual annotation. A natural approach for coping with this problem is active learning (AL), a well-known machine learning technique for improving annotation efficiency by selectively choosing the most informative examples to label. However, while AL has been well-researched in the context of text classification, its application to text generation remained largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a first systematic study of active learning for text generation, considering a diverse set of tasks and multiple leading AL strategies. Our results indicate that existing AL strategies, despite their success in classification, are largely ineffective for the text generation scenario, and fail to consistently surpass the baseline of random example selection. We highlight some notable differences between the classification and generation scenarios, and analyze the selection behaviors of existing AL strategies. Our findings motivate exploring novel approaches for applying AL to NLG tasks.
Distance covariance is a widely used statistical methodology for testing the dependency between two groups of variables. Despite the appealing properties of consistency and superior testing power, the testing results of distance covariance are often hard to be interpreted. This paper presents an elementary interpretation of the mechanism of distance covariance through an additive decomposition of correlations formula. Based on this formula, a visualization method is developed to provide practitioners with a more intuitive explanation of the distance covariance score.
In this paper, we present Deep Functional Factor Model (DF2M), a Bayesian nonparametric model for analyzing high-dimensional functional time series. The DF2M makes use of the Indian Buffet Process and the multi-task Gaussian Process with a deep kernel function to capture non-Markovian and nonlinear temporal dynamics. Unlike many black-box deep learning models, the DF2M provides an explainable way to use neural networks by constructing a factor model and incorporating deep neural networks within the kernel function. Additionally, we develop a computationally efficient variational inference algorithm for inferring the DF2M. Empirical results from four real-world datasets demonstrate that the DF2M offers better explainability and superior predictive accuracy compared to conventional deep learning models for high-dimensional functional time series.
Learning on big data brings success for artificial intelligence (AI), but the annotation and training costs are expensive. In future, learning on small data is one of the ultimate purposes of AI, which requires machines to recognize objectives and scenarios relying on small data as humans. A series of machine learning models is going on this way such as active learning, few-shot learning, deep clustering. However, there are few theoretical guarantees for their generalization performance. Moreover, most of their settings are passive, that is, the label distribution is explicitly controlled by one specified sampling scenario. This survey follows the agnostic active sampling under a PAC (Probably Approximately Correct) framework to analyze the generalization error and label complexity of learning on small data using a supervised and unsupervised fashion. With these theoretical analyses, we categorize the small data learning models from two geometric perspectives: the Euclidean and non-Euclidean (hyperbolic) mean representation, where their optimization solutions are also presented and discussed. Later, some potential learning scenarios that may benefit from small data learning are then summarized, and their potential learning scenarios are also analyzed. Finally, some challenging applications such as computer vision, natural language processing that may benefit from learning on small data are also surveyed.
Interpretability in machine learning (ML) is crucial for high stakes decisions and troubleshooting. In this work, we provide fundamental principles for interpretable ML, and dispel common misunderstandings that dilute the importance of this crucial topic. We also identify 10 technical challenge areas in interpretable machine learning and provide history and background on each problem. Some of these problems are classically important, and some are recent problems that have arisen in the last few years. These problems are: (1) Optimizing sparse logical models such as decision trees; (2) Optimization of scoring systems; (3) Placing constraints into generalized additive models to encourage sparsity and better interpretability; (4) Modern case-based reasoning, including neural networks and matching for causal inference; (5) Complete supervised disentanglement of neural networks; (6) Complete or even partial unsupervised disentanglement of neural networks; (7) Dimensionality reduction for data visualization; (8) Machine learning models that can incorporate physics and other generative or causal constraints; (9) Characterization of the "Rashomon set" of good models; and (10) Interpretable reinforcement learning. This survey is suitable as a starting point for statisticians and computer scientists interested in working in interpretable machine learning.
This paper reviews recent studies in understanding neural-network representations and learning neural networks with interpretable/disentangled middle-layer representations. Although deep neural networks have exhibited superior performance in various tasks, the interpretability is always the Achilles' heel of deep neural networks. At present, deep neural networks obtain high discrimination power at the cost of low interpretability of their black-box representations. We believe that high model interpretability may help people to break several bottlenecks of deep learning, e.g., learning from very few annotations, learning via human-computer communications at the semantic level, and semantically debugging network representations. We focus on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and we revisit the visualization of CNN representations, methods of diagnosing representations of pre-trained CNNs, approaches for disentangling pre-trained CNN representations, learning of CNNs with disentangled representations, and middle-to-end learning based on model interpretability. Finally, we discuss prospective trends in explainable artificial intelligence.
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