No Arabic abstract
Decisions by Machine Learning (ML) models have become ubiquitous. Trusting these decisions requires understanding how algorithms take them. Hence interpretability methods for ML are an active focus of research. A central problem in this context is that both the quality of interpretability methods as well as trust in ML predictions are difficult to measure. Yet evaluations, comparisons and improvements of trust and interpretability require quantifiable measures. Here we propose a quantitative measure for the quality of interpretability methods. Based on that we derive a quantitative measure of trust in ML decisions. Building on previous work we propose to measure intuitive understanding of algorithmic decisions using the information transfer rate at which humans replicate ML model predictions. We provide empirical evidence from crowdsourcing experiments that the proposed metric robustly differentiates interpretability methods. The proposed metric also demonstrates the value of interpretability for ML assisted human decision making: in our experiments providing explanations more than doubled productivity in annotation tasks. However unbiased human judgement is critical for doctors, judges, policy makers and others. Here we derive a trust metric that identifies when human decisions are overly biased towards ML predictions. Our results complement existing qualitative work on trust and interpretability by quantifiable measures that can serve as objectives for further improving methods in this field of research.
Machine learning models have had discernible achievements in a myriad of applications. However, most of these models are black-boxes, and it is obscure how the decisions are made by them. This makes the models unreliable and untrustworthy. To provide insights into the decision making processes of these models, a variety of traditional interpretable models have been proposed. Moreover, to generate more human-friendly explanations, recent work on interpretability tries to answer questions related to causality such as Why does this model makes such decisions? or Was it a specific feature that caused the decision made by the model?. In this work, models that aim to answer causal questions are referred to as causal interpretable models. The existing surveys have covered concepts and methodologies of traditional interpretability. In this work, we present a comprehensive survey on causal interpretable models from the aspects of the problems and methods. In addition, this survey provides in-depth insights into the existing evaluation metrics for measuring interpretability, which can help practitioners understand for what scenarios each evaluation metric is suitable.
We explore trust in a relatively new area of data science: Automated Machine Learning (AutoML). In AutoML, AI methods are used to generate and optimize machine learning models by automatically engineering features, selecting models, and optimizing hyperparameters. In this paper, we seek to understand what kinds of information influence data scientists trust in the models produced by AutoML? We operationalize trust as a willingness to deploy a model produced using automated methods. We report results from three studies -- qualitative interviews, a controlled experiment, and a card-sorting task -- to understand the information needs of data scientists for establishing trust in AutoML systems. We find that including transparency features in an AutoML tool increased user trust and understandability in the tool; and out of all proposed features, model performance metrics and visualizations are the most important information to data scientists when establishing their trust with an AutoML tool.
Recent successes of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in a variety of research tasks, however, heavily rely on the large amounts of labeled samples. This may require considerable annotation cost in real-world applications. Fortunately, active learning is a promising methodology to train high-performing model with minimal annotation cost. In the deep learning context, the critical question of active learning is how to precisely identify the informativeness of samples for DNN. In this paper, inspired by piece-wise linear interpretability in DNN, we introduce the linearly separable regions of samples to the problem of active learning, and propose a novel Deep Active learning approach by Model Interpretability (DAMI). To keep the maximal representativeness of the entire unlabeled data, DAMI tries to select and label samples on different linearly separable regions introduced by the piece-wise linear interpretability in DNN. We focus on modeling Multi-Layer Perception (MLP) for modeling tabular data. Specifically, we use the local piece-wise interpretation in MLP as the representation of each sample, and directly run K-Center clustering to select and label samples. To be noted, this whole process of DAMI does not require any hyper-parameters to tune manually. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, extensive experiments have been conducted on several tabular datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that DAMI constantly outperforms several state-of-the-art compared approaches.
In this paper, we investigate the problem of overfitting in deep reinforcement learning. Among the most common benchmarks in RL, it is customary to use the same environments for both training and testing. This practice offers relatively little insight into an agents ability to generalize. We address this issue by using procedurally generated environments to construct distinct training and test sets. Most notably, we introduce a new environment called CoinRun, designed as a benchmark for generalization in RL. Using CoinRun, we find that agents overfit to surprisingly large training sets. We then show that deeper convolutional architectures improve generalization, as do methods traditionally found in supervised learning, including L2 regularization, dropout, data augmentation and batch normalization.
To date, there has been no formal study of the statistical cost of interpretability in machine learning. As such, the discourse around potential trade-offs is often informal and misconceptions abound. In this work, we aim to initiate a formal study of these trade-offs. A seemingly insurmountable roadblock is the lack of any agreed upon definition of interpretability. Instead, we propose a shift in perspective. Rather than attempt to define interpretability, we propose to model the emph{act} of emph{enforcing} interpretability. As a starting point, we focus on the setting of empirical risk minimization for binary classification, and view interpretability as a constraint placed on learning. That is, we assume we are given a subset of hypothesis that are deemed to be interpretable, possibly depending on the data distribution and other aspects of the context. We then model the act of enforcing interpretability as that of performing empirical risk minimization over the set of interpretable hypotheses. This model allows us to reason about the statistical implications of enforcing interpretability, using known results in statistical learning theory. Focusing on accuracy, we perform a case analysis, explaining why one may or may not observe a trade-off between accuracy and interpretability when the restriction to interpretable classifiers does or does not come at the cost of some excess statistical risk. We close with some worked examples and some open problems, which we hope will spur further theoretical development around the tradeoffs involved in interpretability.