No Arabic abstract
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful black-box predictors that have achieved impressive performance on a wide variety of tasks. However, their accuracy comes at the cost of intelligibility: it is usually unclear how they make their decisions. This hinders their applicability to high stakes decision-making domains such as healthcare. We propose Neural Additive Models (NAMs) which combine some of the expressivity of DNNs with the inherent intelligibility of generalized additive models. NAMs learn a linear combination of neural networks that each attend to a single input feature. These networks are trained jointly and can learn arbitrarily complex relationships between their input feature and the output. Our experiments on regression and classification datasets show that NAMs are more accurate than widely used intelligible models such as logistic regression and shallow decision trees. They perform similarly to existing state-of-the-art generalized additive models in accuracy, but can be more easily applied to real-world problems.
Time series models with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) can have high accuracy but are unfortunately difficult to interpret as a result of feature-interactions, temporal-interactions, and non-linear transformations. Interpretability is important in domains like healthcare where constructing models that provide insight into the relationships they have learned are required to validate and trust model predictions. We want accurate time series models where users can understand the contribution of individual input features. We present the Interpretable-RNN (I-RNN) that balances model complexity and accuracy by forcing the relationship between variables in the model to be additive. Interactions are restricted between hidden states of the RNN and additively combined at the final step. I-RNN specifically captures the unique characteristics of clinical time series, which are unevenly sampled in time, asynchronously acquired, and have missing data. Importantly, the hidden state activations represent feature coefficients that correlate with the prediction target and can be visualized as risk curves that capture the global relationship between individual input features and the outcome. We evaluate the I-RNN model on the Physionet 2012 Challenge dataset to predict in-hospital mortality, and on a real-world clinical decision support task: predicting hemodynamic interventions in the intensive care unit. I-RNN provides explanations in the form of global and local feature importances comparable to highly intelligible models like decision trees trained on hand-engineered features while significantly outperforming them. I-RNN remains intelligible while providing accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art decay-based and interpolation-based recurrent time series models. The experimental results on real-world clinical datasets refute the myth that there is a tradeoff between accuracy and interpretability.
Interpretability of learning-to-rank models is a crucial yet relatively under-examined research area. Recent progress on interpretable ranking models largely focuses on generating post-hoc explanations for existing black-box ranking models, whereas the alternative option of building an intrinsically interpretable ranking model with transparent and self-explainable structure remains unexplored. Developing fully-understandable ranking models is necessary in some scenarios (e.g., due to legal or policy constraints) where post-hoc methods cannot provide sufficiently accurate explanations. In this paper, we lay the groundwork for intrinsically interpretable learning-to-rank by introducing generalized additive models (GAMs) into ranking tasks. Generalized additive models (GAMs) are intrinsically interpretable machine learning models and have been extensively studied on regression and classification tasks. We study how to extend GAMs into ranking models which can handle both item-level and list-level features and propose a novel formulation of ranking GAMs. To instantiate ranking GAMs, we employ neural networks instead of traditional splines or regression trees. We also show that our neural ranking GAMs can be distilled into a set of simple and compact piece-wise linear functions that are much more efficient to evaluate with little accuracy loss. We conduct experiments on three data sets and show that our proposed neural ranking GAMs can achieve significantly better performance than other traditional GAM baselines while maintaining similar interpretability.
We propose a new framework for Imitation Learning (IL) via density estimation of the experts occupancy measure followed by Maximum Occupancy Entropy Reinforcement Learning (RL) using the density as a reward. Our approach maximizes a non-adversarial model-free RL objective that provably lower bounds reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence between occupancy measures of the expert and imitator. We present a practical IL algorithm, Neural Density Imitation (NDI), which obtains state-of-the-art demonstration efficiency on benchmark control tasks.
Most existing interpretable methods explain a black-box model in a post-hoc manner, which uses simpler models or data analysis techniques to interpret the predictions after the model is learned. However, they (a) may derive contradictory explanations on the same predictions given different methods and data samples, and (b) focus on using simpler models to provide higher descriptive accuracy at the sacrifice of prediction accuracy. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid interpretable model that combines a piecewise linear component and a nonlinear component. The first component describes the explicit feature contributions by piecewise linear approximation to increase the expressiveness of the model. The other component uses a multi-layer perceptron to capture feature interactions and implicit nonlinearity, and increase the prediction performance. Different from the post-hoc approaches, the interpretability is obtained once the model is learned in the form of feature shapes. We also provide a variant to explore higher-order interactions among features to demonstrate that the proposed model is flexible for adaptation. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model can achieve good interpretability by describing feature shapes while maintaining state-of-the-art accuracy.
Interpretability has largely focused on local explanations, i.e. explaining why a model made a particular prediction for a sample. These explanations are appealing due to their simplicity and local fidelity. However, they do not provide information about the general behavior of the model. We propose to leverage model distillation to learn global additive explanations that describe the relationship between input features and model predictions. These global explanations take the form of feature shapes, which are more expressive than feature attributions. Through careful experimentation, we show qualitatively and quantitatively that global additive explanations are able to describe model behavior and yield insights about models such as neural nets. A visualization of our approach applied to a neural net as it is trained is available at https://youtu.be/ErQYwNqzEdc.