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An Initial Study of Machine Learning Underspecification Using Feature Attribution Explainable AI Algorithms: A COVID-19 Virus Transmission Case Study

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PRICAI 2021: Trends in Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2021)

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Abstract

From a dataset, one can construct different machine learning (ML) models with different parameters and/or inductive biases. Although these models give similar prediction performances when tested on data that are currently available, they may not generalise equally well on unseen data. The existence of multiple equally performing models exhibits underspecification of the ML pipeline used for producing such models. In this work, we propose identifying underspecification using feature attribution algorithms developed in Explainable AI. Our hypothesis is: by studying the range of explanations produced by ML models, one can identify underspecification. We validate this by computing explanations using the Shapley additive explainer and then measuring statistical correlations between them. We experiment our approach on multiple datasets drawn from the literature, and in a COVID-19 virus transmission case study.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/public-health-england.

  2. 2.

    https://rp5.ru/Weather_in_the_world.

  3. 3.

    As can be seen from Eq. 4, when \(c_x\) is small, \(R_t\) can flatulate in a unrealistically large range and generate noises in the dataset.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Welsh Government Office for Science, Ser Cymru III programme – Tackling Covid-19.

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Correspondence to Xiuyi Fan .

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Hinns, J., Fan, X., Liu, S., Raghava Reddy Kovvuri, V., Yalcin, M.O., Roggenbach, M. (2021). An Initial Study of Machine Learning Underspecification Using Feature Attribution Explainable AI Algorithms: A COVID-19 Virus Transmission Case Study. In: Pham, D.N., Theeramunkong, T., Governatori, G., Liu, F. (eds) PRICAI 2021: Trends in Artificial Intelligence. PRICAI 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13031. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89188-6_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89188-6_24

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