By their nature, the composition of black box models is opaque. This makes the ability to generate explanations for the response to stimuli challenging. The importance of explaining black box models has become increasingly important given the prevalence of AI and ML systems and the need to build legal and regulatory frameworks around them. Such explanations can also increase trust in these uncertain systems. In our paper we present RICE, a method for generating explanations of the behaviour of black box models by (1) probing a model to extract model output examples using sensitivity analysis; (2) applying CNPInduce, a method for inductive logic program synthesis, to generate logic programs based on critical input-output pairs; and (3) interpreting the target program as a human-readable explanation. We demonstrate the application of our method by generating explanations of an artificial neural network trained to follow simple traffic rules in a hypothetical self-driving car simulation. We conclude with a discussion on the scalability and usability of our approach and its potential applications to explanation-critical scenarios.
In @cite_10 the authors produced an Open the black box taxonomy'' to better understand different approaches to explaining black box models. At the top level there are two options: To formulate a black box explanation, and design a transparent box. The latter has been discussed in some depth in @cite_20 where its author argues that explanations are often unreliable and misleading, and therefore black box models should not be used for critical systems. She cites several examples where lack of transparency and accountability of predictive models have had severe consequences. Counter-arguments to interpretable ML models include black boxes holding significant value and intellectual property for the model authors, and that interpretable models can be more costly to construct. They further define the that requires an explanation model that is globally interpretable''; that is to be able to mimic the behaviour of the black box should be understandable by a human.
@cite_10 @cite_20
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We propose Black Box Explanations through Transparent Approximations (BETA), a novel model agnostic framework for explaining the behavior of any black-box classifier by simultaneously optimizing for fidelity to the original model and interpretability of the explanation. To this end, we develop a novel objective function which allows us to learn (with optimality guarantees), a small number of compact decision sets each of which explains the behavior of the black box model in unambiguous, well-defined regions of feature space. Furthermore, our framework also is capable of accepting user input when generating these approximations, thus allowing users to interactively explore how the black-box model behaves in different subspaces that are of interest to the user. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach which can produce global explanations of the behavior of any given black box model through joint optimization of unambiguity, fidelity, and interpretability, while also allowing users to explore model behavior based on their preferences. Experimental evaluation with real-world datasets and user studies demonstrates that our approach can generate highly compact, easy-to-understand, yet accurate approximations of various kinds of predictive models compared to state-of-the-art baselines. In the last years many accurate decision support systems have been constructed as black boxes, that is as systems that hide their internal logic to the user. This lack of explanation constitutes both a practical and an ethical issue. The literature reports many approaches aimed at overcoming this crucial weakness sometimes at the cost of scarifying accuracy for interpretability. The applications in which black box decision systems can be used are various, and each approach is typically developed to provide a solution for a specific problem and, as a consequence, delineating explicitly or implicitly its own definition of interpretability and explanation. The aim of this paper is to provide a classification of the main problems addressed in the literature with respect to the notion of explanation and the type of black box system. Given a problem definition, a black box type, and a desired explanation this survey should help the researcher to find the proposals more useful for his own work. The proposed classification of approaches to open black box models should also be useful for putting the many research open questions in perspective. In recent years, many accurate decision support systems have been constructed as black boxes, that is as systems that hide their internal logic to the user. This lack of explanation constitutes both a practical and an ethical issue. The literature reports many approaches aimed at overcoming this crucial weakness, sometimes at the cost of sacrificing accuracy for interpretability. The applications in which black box decision systems can be used are various, and each approach is typically developed to provide a solution for a specific problem and, as a consequence, it explicitly or implicitly delineates its own definition of interpretability and explanation. The aim of this article is to provide a classification of the main problems addressed in the literature with respect to the notion of explanation and the type of black box system. Given a problem definition, a black box type, and a desired explanation, this survey should help the researcher to find the proposals more useful for his own work. The proposed classification of approaches to open black box models should also be useful for putting the many research open questions in perspective. The widescale use of machine learning algorithms to drive decision-making has highlighted the critical importance of ensuring the interpretability of such models in order to engender trust in their output. The state-of-the-art recommendation systems use black-box latent factor models that provide no explanation of why a recommendation has been made, as they abstract their decision processes to a high-dimensional latent space which is beyond the direct comprehension of humans. We propose a novel approach for extracting explanations from latent factor recommendation systems by training association rules on the output of a matrix factorisation black-box model. By taking advantage of the interpretable structure of association rules, we demonstrate that predictive accuracy of the recommendation model can be maintained whilst yielding explanations with high fidelity to the black-box model on a unique industry dataset. Our approach mitigates the accuracy-interpretability trade-off whilst avoiding the need to sacrifice flexibility or use external data sources. We also contribute to the ill-defined problem of evaluating interpretability.