Supervised Local Modeling for Interpretability

Model interpretability is an increasingly important component of practical machine learning. Some of the most common forms of interpretability systems are example-based, local, and global explanations. One of the main challenges in interpretability is designing explanation systems that can capture aspects of each of these explanation types, in order to develop a more thorough understanding of the model. We address this challenge in a novel model called SLIM that uses local linear modeling techniques along with a dual interpretation of random forests (both as a supervised neighborhood approach and as a feature selection method). SLIM has two fundamental advantages over existing interpretability systems. First, while it is effective as a black-box explanation system, SLIM itself is a highly accurate predictive model that provides faithful self explanations, and thus sidesteps the typical accuracy-interpretability trade-off. Second, SLIM provides both example- based and local explanations and can detect global patterns, which allows it to diagnose limitations in its local explanations.