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Explaining Black-Box Models Using Interpretable Surrogates

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11670))

Abstract

Explaining black-box machine learning models is important for their successful applicability to many real world problems. Existing approaches to model explanation either focus on explaining a particular decision instance or are applicable only to specific models. In this paper, we address these limitations by proposing a new model-agnostic mechanism to black-box model explainability. Our approach can be utilised to explain the predictions of any black-box machine learning model. Our work uses interpretable surrogate models (e.g. a decision tree) to extract global rules to describe the preditions of a model. We develop an optimization procedure, which helps a decision tree to mimic a black-box model, by efficiently retraining the decision tree in a sequential manner, using the data labeled by the black-box model. We demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed framework using three applications: two classification models, one built using iris dataset, other using synthetic dataset and a regression model built for bike sharing dataset.

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Acknowledgement

This research was partially funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (ARC). Prof Venkatesh is the recipient of an ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship (FL170100006).

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Correspondence to Deepthi Praveenlal Kuttichira .

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Kuttichira, D.P., Gupta, S., Li, C., Rana, S., Venkatesh, S. (2019). Explaining Black-Box Models Using Interpretable Surrogates. In: Nayak, A., Sharma, A. (eds) PRICAI 2019: Trends in Artificial Intelligence. PRICAI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11670. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29908-8_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29908-8_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-29907-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29908-8

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