Interpretability in machine learning (ML) is crucial for high stakes decisions and troubleshooting. In this work, we provide fundamental principles for interpretable ML, and dispel common misunderstandings that dilute the importance of this crucial topic. We also identify 10 technical challenge areas in interpretable machine learning and provide history and background on each problem. Some of these problems are classically important, and some are recent problems that have arisen in the last few years. These problems are: (1) Optimizing sparse logical models such as decision trees; (2) Optimization of scoring systems; (3) Placing constraints into generalized additive models to encourage sparsity and better interpretability; (4) Modern case-based reasoning, including neural networks and matching for causal inference; (5) Complete supervised disentanglement of neural networks; (6) Complete or even partial unsupervised disentanglement of neural networks; (7) Dimensionality reduction for data visualization; (8) Machine learning models that can incorporate physics and other generative or causal constraints; (9) Characterization of the "Rashomon set" of good models; and (10) Interpretable reinforcement learning. This survey is suitable as a starting point for statisticians and computer scientists interested in working in interpretable machine learning.

We've all had a hard drive fail on us, and often it's as sudden as booting your machine and realizing you can't access a bunch of your files. It's especially not fun when you have an entire data center full of drives that are all important to keeping your business running. What if we could predict when one of those drives would fail, and get ahead of it by preemptively replacing the hardware before the data is lost? This is where the history of predictive drive failure at Datto begins. First and foremost, to make a prediction you need data. Hard drives have a built-in utility called SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) that reports an array of statistics about how the drive is functioning. Here's an abbreviated view of what that looks like: Datto collects a report like this from each hard drive in its storage servers once per day. Each attribute in the report has three important numbers associated with it: value, thresh, and worst. Each attribute also has a feature named raw_value, but this is discarded due to inconsistent reporting standards between drive manufacturers. The value reflects how well the drive is operating with respect to the attribute, with 1 being the worst and 253 being the best. The initial value is arbitrarily determined by the manufacturer, and can vary by drive model. Thresh: A threshold below which the value should not fall in normal operation.

Multiple organ failure (MOF) is a life-threatening condition. Due to its urgency and high mortality rate, early detection is critical for clinicians to provide appropriate treatment. In this paper, we perform quantitative analysis on early MOF prediction with comprehensive machine learning (ML) configurations, including data preprocessing (missing value treatment, label balancing, feature scaling), feature selection, classifier choice, and hyperparameter tuning. Results show that classifier choice impacts both the performance improvement and variation most among all the configurations. In general, complex classifiers including ensemble methods can provide better performance than simple classifiers. However, blindly pursuing complex classifiers is unwise as it also brings the risk of greater performance variation.

To facilitate implementation of high-accuracy deep neural networks especially on resource-constrained devices, maintaining low computation requirements is crucial. Using very deep models for classification purposes not only decreases the neural network training speed and increases the inference time, but also need more data for higher prediction accuracy and to mitigate false positives. In this paper, we propose an efficient and lightweight deep classification ensemble structure based on a combination of simple color features, which is particularly designed for "high-accuracy" image classifications with low false positives. We designed, implemented, and evaluated our approach for explosion detection use-case applied to images and videos. Our evaluation results based on a large test test show considerable improvements on the prediction accuracy compared to the popular ResNet-50 model, while benefiting from 7.64x faster inference and lower computation cost. While we applied our approach to explosion detection, our approach is general and can be applied to other similar classification use cases as well. Given the insight gained from our experiments, we hence propose a "think small, think many" philosophy in classification scenarios: that transforming a single, large, monolithic deep model into a verification-based step model ensemble of multiple small, simple, lightweight models with narrowed-down color spaces can possibly lead to predictions with higher accuracy.

With the development of measurement technology, data on the movements of actual games in various sports are available and are expected to be used for planning and evaluating the tactics and strategy. In particular, defense in team sports is generally difficult to be evaluated because of the lack of statistical data. Conventional evaluation methods based on predictions of scores are considered unreliable and predict rare events throughout the entire game, and it is difficult to evaluate various plays leading up to a score. On the other hand, evaluation methods based on certain plays that lead to scoring and dominant regions are sometimes unsuitable to evaluate the performance (e.g., goals scored) of players and teams. In this study, we propose a method to evaluate team defense from a comprehensive perspective related to team performance based on the prediction of ball recovery and being attacked, which occur more frequently than goals, using player actions and positional data of all players and the ball. Using data from 45 soccer matches, we examined the relationship between the proposed index and team performance in actual matches and throughout a season. Results show that the proposed classifiers more accurately predicted the true events than the existing classifiers which were based on rare events (i.e., goals). Also, the proposed index had a moderate correlation with the long-term outcomes of the season. These results suggest that the proposed index might be a more reliable indicator rather than winning or losing with the inclusion of accidental factors.

Handwriting recognition is of crucial importance to both Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and paperwork digitization. In the general field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), handwritten Chinese character recognition faces tremendous challenges due to the enormously large character sets and the amazing diversity of writing styles. Learning an appropriate distance metric to measure the difference between data inputs is the foundation of accurate handwritten character recognition. Existing distance metric learning approaches either produce unacceptable error rates, or provide little interpretability in the results. In this paper, we propose an interpretable distance metric learning approach for handwritten Chinese character recognition. The learned metric is a linear combination of intelligible base metrics, and thus provides meaningful insights to ordinary users. Our experimental results on a benchmark dataset demonstrate the superior efficiency, accuracy and interpretability of our proposed approach.

Backdoor attack injects malicious behavior to models such that inputs embedded with triggers are misclassified to a target label desired by the attacker. However, natural features may behave like triggers, causing misclassification once embedded. While they are inevitable, mis-recognizing them as injected triggers causes false warnings in backdoor scanning. A prominent challenge is hence to distinguish natural features and injected backdoors. We develop a novel symmetric feature differencing method that identifies a smallest set of features separating two classes. A backdoor is considered injected if the corresponding trigger consists of features different from the set of features distinguishing the victim and target classes. We evaluate the technique on thousands of models, including both clean and trojaned models, from the TrojAI rounds 2-4 competitions and a number of models on ImageNet. Existing backdoor scanning techniques may produce hundreds of false positives (i.e., clean models recognized as trojaned). Our technique removes 78-100% of the false positives (by a state-of-the-art scanner ABS) with a small increase of false negatives by 0-30%, achieving 17-41% overall accuracy improvement, and facilitates achieving top performance on the leaderboard. It also boosts performance of other scanners. It outperforms false positive removal methods using L2 distance and attribution techniques. We also demonstrate its potential in detecting a number of semantic backdoor attacks.

Covid-19 can be accurately detected by skin swabs rubbed on the face, neck or back, a study suggests. Currently, the only way to reliably detect Covid-19 is with highly-invasive swabs which go up the nose or to the back of the throat. But University of Surrey researchers say sebum -- a waxy substance made by glands in the skin -- is altered by the coronavirus and can therefore be used to detect signs of infection. Currently, the only way to reliably detect Covid-19 is with highly-invasive swabs which go up the nose or to the back of the throat. Sixty-seven hospitalised patients were recruited for the study between May and June 2020.

What if I told you that companies that don't embrace Ethical AI are leaving significant amounts of "Money on the Table"; that they are not only missing out on potentially profitable customers, but that over time they are eroding their Total Addressable Market (TAM)? Do I have your attention now? After I published the blog "The Ethical AI Application Pyramid", a question from Karrie Sullivan coupled with a mentoring session with the startup unfog.ai "If your AI model doesn't take into consideration the ultimate outcomes of the AI model's False Negatives, then confirmation bias in the AI model could set in and eventually the company's Total Addressable Market (TAM) could shrink to a point where the business might no longer be viable." Yea, not only is Ethical AI the right thing to do from a cultural and society perspective, but there are direct bottom-line financial ramifications if your AI models are not learning and adapting from the AI model's False Negatives.

There are demographic biases in the SOTA CNN used for FR. Our BFW dataset serves as a proxy to measure bias across ethnicity and gender subgroups, allowing us to characterize FR performances per subgroup. We show performances are non-optimal when a single score threshold is used to determine whether sample pairs are genuine or imposter. Furthermore, actual performance ratings vary greatly from the reported across subgroups. Thus, claims of specific error rates only hold true for populations matching that of the validation data. We mitigate the imbalanced performances using a novel domain adaptation learning scheme on the facial encodings extracted using SOTA deep nets. Not only does this technique balance performance, but it also boosts the overall performance. A benefit of the proposed is to preserve identity information in facial features while removing demographic knowledge in the lower dimensional features. The removal of demographic knowledge prevents future potential biases from being injected into decision-making. Additionally, privacy concerns are satisfied by this removal. We explore why this works qualitatively with hard samples. We also show quantitatively that subgroup classifiers can no longer learn from the encodings mapped by the proposed.